I actually dream about bringing Atom (as far as I understand it's better than RSS but RSS just seems a better brand-name for this, in fact in many cases when you click on a link that says RSS you'll get Atom) back, expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments, implementing it better (auto-generated feeds on many sites are pretty crappy) and popularizing generic feed readers so non-geeks would be able to interact with others' self-hosted blogs (like my blog built on GitHub Pages) as easy and fun as it they do with Facebook, Instagram etc.

> expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments

One of the problems I had with blog comments is spam. Blogger would queue up moderated comments and send you an email about them. The idea occurred to me that that was redundant and it would be better to cut out the middleman - you are getting email notifications about comments needing moderation, and email already had long established and much better spam filtering. Why not have people submit comments via email? That way you can also reply to people privately. This is also convenient for people who read their feeds via RSS-to-email or in newsreaders/email clients like Thunderbird and Gnus.

Another aspect of comments via email is that it is much more like a letter to the editor. Your blog posts are articles, and you can choose to update them with corrections and comments that people send in, instead of trying to manage a half-baked message board that is the standard LiveJournal/Blogger/Wordpress/Disqus comments section.

I think an easy and valuable way to get non-geeks to use web page feeds more is to provide the option to sign up for the feed via email, by offering a "newsletter" option.

I upvoted your response as your ideas are very reasonable but as for me, I don't like e-mail for a number of reasons, both psychologically subjective and technical.

The first things the e-mail ecosystem is to do to become more adequate to the modern day world are to deprecate all the codepages but UTF-8 for any part of a message (header included), eliminate the overquoting tradition (including full text of the message the message is a response to) and introduce an efficient thread tracing mechanism instead, establish a more reasonable signature culture (i.e. people and software to stop including redundant and useless information in the bottom of every message) and make Markdown a core part of the standard (while HTML should better be deprecated).

I also agree that email should be a personal preference. I think that DFeed[1][2] shows how open discussion systems should be built. DFeed provides a unified discussion system that is simultaneously accessible through email, NNTP, a web interface, and Atom feeds. That would be a really nice way to offer a comment discussion system on a blog.

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/help#about [2] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed