After developing my own rss reader[1] i think atproto could be the successor of rss. It is the same principal. The only difference is it is more complex and there are more components like the firehose, which is optional, the reader could just scrape their following themself. I think the resource usage is also only a problem if you want a view of the entire network, if we treat it more like rss it would be totally fine to just keep the portion of the network we are interested in. Its not as straight forward as rss, because of types like comments and likes. To notice them you need to listen to the entire network stream, but you do not need to save everything. I am really excited where this will go.

[1] https://ivyreader.com