That's a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don't want to spend a penny, but because they don't want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like 'instant donate 5 cents' most people would click that a lot.

The closest thing I've heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.

RSS is great for content consumption. It's a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.

That said though, RSS doesn't help for participation, it's a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that's still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.

My understanding of RSS is that it's basically a list of metadata and links for content... Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I'm not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though... are you? That's a huge feature to miss if we're talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.