Most importantly, that although it doesn’t function that way because everthing is funnelled through skinnyfarm.com, it doesn’t have to be. I could create another site and join in on the these feeds.

Both SkinnyFarm and the new site would “sync” the opml files of their feeds and create a metacommunity.

So they are communal feeds, like you say, but they are also two-way in the sense that this doesn’t have to happen centrally at skinnyfarm. Skinnyfarm is just the only operating node.

maybe I should create a wordpress plugin.

Or maybe you’d be willing to host a node. Yes, nodes. I think that’s the way to make this work.