How the main feed ranking works
Every user has their own personal subscription list of RSS feeds. Obviously by default they can view their own feeds like any old traditional reader. What makes this unique is there would be a local feed page. This would contain a list of most popularly subscribed feeds among users within that rss instance. There would also be another page for a global list of feeds across all instances which depends on the optional relationship between other instances. This being either uni/bi direction or no relationship at all. If instance A follows instance B, then A’s global list contains a rank of feeds by users of both A and B. Global isn’t strictly all instances because we want them to be federated and give the option to control any necessary resource overhead.
How users interact
A big problem with RSS’s lack of success is that the modern internet is far too complex for any single user to collect feeds on their own. We want users to click on other’s profiles to see what they follow, along with the option to follow whatever is on any type of list. On a local or global feed page, every item in that list has a comment section. This would be similar to HN and Reddit, but with downvoting and overall karma being optional per instance. Of course there could also be other feed ranked pages that make use of this karma similar to Reddit and HN.
Any feedback is appreciated.