Yes it is confusing when the HN title is "Atom 1.0".

For further confusion possibilities, try any of these sentences.

  - "Hey, Atom 1.0 is out."
  - "For my next project I'm using Atom."
  - "I can't believe Atom took this long to get to 1.0 and it's already obsolete."

How is it outdated? Atom is absolutely everywhere and there's no replacement, or a need for it.

I suppose I meant the concept of RSS or whatever is itself outdated/unused to most people

That might be true for the classic case of following blogposts, but it's used under the hood all over the place. I'd call it one of the few absolute wins in standards on the web. It's ubiquitous for its use-case.

Even for following blogposts, what better alternatives exist? Genuinely curious here -- I read about how RSS/Atom is obsolete all the time but I still use them with feedly to follow blogs and news sites and don't see a better alternative.

Twitter and Facebook tend to produce too much noise in my experience to work as an alternative. I have an aversion to reading email newsletters, and they also get lost under noise.

Sure, most people don't use feeds, but even after the demise of Google Reader I reckon they still work just as well as they ever have and are the best way to keep up to date with blogs and provide yourself with a constant source of interesting reading.