If I’m gonna pay for the food already then why would I want to have to do more work just to eat it?

Fully agree with you.

Yep. As someone in the States, I basically stopped using it. It at least worked well to get people on it here and anything with them was encrypted.

I don’t know how much better going to another closed system is. AFAIK it’s only Google running these servers and only their implementation.

Seems it was temporary maybe?

I add .rss (note the period) and it works fine.