As far as Twitter, I'm not sure it was ever that great of an information source. Musk has at least said they're trying to improve Twitter search, but who knows what it will look like. It's still pretty weak at present.
Why corporate media journalists and politicians flocked to Twitter in the past is unclear, unless that it was that Twitter's structure was deliberately designed for propaganda distribution. The low character count and leader-follower structure helps with the standard propaganda routine, which typically involves reducing complex arguments and ideas to the point that a small child could understand them, and then repeating that dumbed-down argument over and over while browbeating anyone who raises objections.
I'd recommend just using Atom. It is as widely supported as RSS but far better specified so your readers will have a consistent result.
JSON Feed is fine but provides very little benefit and isn't as widely supported. Having multiple feed links for the same content will give some users analysis paralysis. (What we really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec that says "these two feeds have the exact same content, if you support both formats only show your preferred format to the user")
I wrote up a guide for my recommended RSS Best Practices which while not aimed at how to create your own feed contains enough information to do that.
JSON Feed is in a catch-22. Not many websites use it (and none can use it exclusively) because not as many clients support it. Few clients support it because not many websites use it. While an auto-discovery spec would be great, having multiple feeds is currently the only way to add JSON Feed and break the cycle.
> What we really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec that says "these two feeds have the exact same content, if you support both formats only show your preferred format to the user"
You could do that right now by having 1 URL that changes what type it returns based on the request's "Accept" type. However, I don't know if any websites/clients actually do that, or if it would break older clients.
Yeah, it is a catch-22, but there is little reason to break it IMHO since it doesn't bring much extra to the table. My feed reader does support it but I would still recommend Atom. It is more mature, has more features and extensions and is supported everywhere.
The main thing JSON Feed seems to have going for it is that it isn't XML which honestly isn't a very compelling argument.
The accept type is a good idea. Unfortunately few static site hosts (which is common for RSS feeds) support this. And many CDNs don't either. It also doesn't play the best with HTTP caching.
https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html
https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp
However, I notice that JSON feeds are also an option and might be preferable for various reasons (i.e. Python's json module makes parsing easy, etc.):
https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/
As far as Twitter, I'm not sure it was ever that great of an information source. Musk has at least said they're trying to improve Twitter search, but who knows what it will look like. It's still pretty weak at present.
Why corporate media journalists and politicians flocked to Twitter in the past is unclear, unless that it was that Twitter's structure was deliberately designed for propaganda distribution. The low character count and leader-follower structure helps with the standard propaganda routine, which typically involves reducing complex arguments and ideas to the point that a small child could understand them, and then repeating that dumbed-down argument over and over while browbeating anyone who raises objections.