From memory, it was deprecated with around 12 months of notice, there were provisions for migrating/exporting all your data etc.... - and to be honest, the writing was on the wall for RSS for a long time before that.
You couldn't export all your data easily unless you were only interested in starred item and subscriptions. If you cared about tagged items, you had to write your own code to fetch that or find someone else that did this (I know because I wrote such script).
It is true that you could access all of it and that you had about 3 months time to do so (not 12).
As far as RSS goes, I am still using it daily and have no problem finding sources except few places that really go for walled-garden like Google's G+.
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You couldn't export all your data easily unless you were only interested in starred item and subscriptions. If you cared about tagged items, you had to write your own code to fetch that or find someone else that did this (I know because I wrote such script).
It is true that you could access all of it and that you had about 3 months time to do so (not 12).
As far as RSS goes, I am still using it daily and have no problem finding sources except few places that really go for walled-garden like Google's G+.