You can syndicate static websites with ActivityPub, pretty much the same way as you do with RSS, except you're generating JSON-LD (ugh) rather than XML (ugh). I've seen a proof-by-example, but I don't have the URL where I can easily find it. The downside is that Mastodon, the most used AP server, doesn't provide a way of subscribing to a static AP feed (it might work if you also had a simple webfinger script to point to it).
I actually like the 'eliminate all the styling' feature of RSS. It's kind of a pleasure to read blog posts and news articles in my mobile feed reader (tt-rss for android).
Except for when the content wasn’t included. That was the problem with RSS. It could never decide whether it was supposed to be distributing the content or distributing notifications of the content.
That decision was made by the drive for “pageviews” both by ad-driven pages and others that just wanted to know how many people were reading.
It was also made because quite a few services used RSS feeds for uses like auto posting bots and what not, where they got information from a blog/news site and posted about on their forums/social media service. In those cases, you didn't want it to post the full article.
I appreciate the pointer! I expect that ActivityPub is the right idea, but just needs to be refined by competitors. Much like XML-RPC and SOAP eventually gave way to REST. It could be the real deal, though.
I actually like the 'eliminate all the styling' feature of RSS. It's kind of a pleasure to read blog posts and news articles in my mobile feed reader (tt-rss for android).