This is my first Branch topic and I already love the service - it's intuitive, it's innovative, and it's organic. However, despite the fact that you can embed Branch widgets on other pages, there doesn't seem to be any way to subscribe to a Branch using RSS (though you can subscribe via email)

Am I mistaken about that? If not then Branch is ultimately no more open than Facebook or Twitter. Branch's mission statement is about fostering conversation in a new way; but doing so by the old way of a closed content silo doesn't really achieve that goal in a global, broad sense.

At a bare minimum, Branch topics should be RSS-compatible. This would allow users to back-up their Branches, to create new functionalities (using tools such as IFTTT).

I just tried:

branch.com

which is the URL of this branch, with /feed/ appended to it. That's the convention used by Wordpress for RSS feeds, and it works on all levels of interaction - you can generate RSS feeds per category, per tag, per comment thread, etc.

This would be an easy way to add RSS support to Branch.