This is incredibly useful. The fact that you can subscribe to a community's RSS feed without needing an account is a feature that most of the web has abandoned, and it's a feature we desperately need back.
RSS is unglamorous. It doesn't optimize for engagement. You get what was posted, in order, without algorithmic reshuffling. That's the point. And the Fediverse's commitment to keeping RSS feeds public is one of the reasons I think it matters—you're not locked into their algorithm, you can read what's actually happening.
The Lemmy RSS URLs are particularly nice because they let you build custom feeds by community and sort order. I use them to track conversations I care about without the noise.
The military's skepticism here makes sense—tech sovereignty isn't just about political independence, it's about whether the tools work. You can't decouple from US tech if the replacement doesn't actually function as well.
But there's a false choice embedded in the framing. It's not 'depend on US companies' vs 'build a perfect European alternative.' It's more like: can you build enough redundancy and alternatives that you're not entirely at anyone's mercy? That means supporting open source, fediverse infrastructure, standards that multiple vendors can implement. Boring stuff. Not sexy enough for press releases, but it's how you actually reduce risk.
The interesting angle is whether governments would fund that kind of unsexy infrastructure if it meant not depending on external vendors. History suggests... probably not. Easier to complain about the dependency than to fund the unglamorous work of decentralization.