Hello, RSS Feed fans. This article is for people who’ve chosen to use RSS feeds, and picked an RSS feed reader. Those choices are outside the scope of this article. What this article is about is filling your empty feed reader, deciding what to put in there and how to surf the web in search of feeds.
However, I can’t just tell you what exactly to pop in there. I will give you a few direct recommendations in the end, but you need to find things you enjoy and add them in yourself. These are some guidelines to help you select things to add.
The common feed icon depicts the tip of an antennae, with two or three radio waves rippling out of it. The RSS Logo is typically orange, although it comes in other colours. If you see this icon, it should represent an RSS Feed.
Not all websites will have an obvious link to their RSS feed. but it will still exist.
If a social media platform debut’d in the 00s, there’s a good chance it supports RSS. There’s a bit of an RSS support gap in mainstream social media platforms which started in the 10s. But RSS is still common enough that if in doubt, you should always check and see.
It depends on the culture in which the website was developed, as well. Websites from the computer geek side of the web, open-source and GNU nerds (affectionate), have RSS support a lot. VC-funded web startups that want to be the new Facebook, the people who want to build a web silo, are less likely to build RSS support into their website. A fediverse site like Mastodon supports RSS feeds, a fediverse site like Bluesky or Threads doesn’t.
[see: Footnote 1]
My web browser automatically detects RSS feeds, and adds an icon to the address bar if it detects one. If yours browser doesn’t, there are browser extensions. Haven’t got a specific one to recommend, just look around.
Some RSS feed providers will automatically detect a feed if you put a URL in. You can also use a service like getrssfeed.com can detect RSS feeds on a website.
Search engines can help you find RSS feeds for platforms the manual way. Type Platform + RSS Feed into a search engine, and it’ll let you know if feeds exist.
Although it might seem like an easy way to fill your feeds, just duplicating your existing social media feeds is unadvisable. Give yourself new things to look at, or you’re going to get burned out seeing nothing but repetitive notifications.
There’s probably a large social media platform full of very talented and interesting users, but you don’t really want to use it for whatever reason. And if the platform supports RSS feeds, well, there you go. As a personal example, I don’t go on Deviantart much any more. Even less, since I moved the few people I followed into my RSS feed. “But Deviantart doesn’t have RSS after the Eclipse update” says the person who didn’t search and see the first result for Deviantart + RSS Feed.
So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. Think if this person who’s posts you already like, and is using a platform you don’t. A Tumblr user you like also uses Mastodon. Now, you don’t use Mastodon in this hypothetical, but you want to see that poster’s sweet Mastodon posts. Mastodon is a website that supports RSS feeds. Add their feed to your reader, follow the posts, all without needing a Mastodon account.
Sometimes, its ok to just duplicate your existing social media feeds, if the feeds are algorithm-driven and unreliable. People question Youtube’s reliability, I think its superstitious but you can add Youtube channels to your feed reader so you KNOW you’re not missing anything.
One of the good things about RSS is how you don’t need to limit yourself to notable platforms. There’s a large web out there, and RSS feeds can help you keep up with it all. I know its the harder work, but you’d be surprised at how easily they accumulate in your feed once you start. This is about exercising your web surfing skills. Be curious, and bias towards subscribing to a webmaster rather than not subscribing.
Web native media like blogs, webcomics, and podcasts very often have RSS feeds. There’s even a website just for webcomic feeds, called Piperka.
You can use RSS feeds to automate forum lurking, although even forums software from the heyday of RSS have patchy support. The best forum software RSS support I’ve found is for Discourse, which one of the newer forum softwares on the block. New as in its ten years old, but u get it. For example, PHPBB has been around twice as long and has RSS support that sucks out of the box. Webmasters can choose to extend the RSS feed support of forums with plugins, but you know, they don’t lol. Feel free to ask ur local forum webmaster to install the RSS plugin if u want. Still, if a forum is slow-moving enough, it having just the one feed might be enough to lurk it.
Kill the newsletter
Some webmasters opt for an email newsletter instead of an RSS feed. But you can subscribe to that newsletter as an RSS feed, using kill-the-newsletter.
I think experiencing newsletters as an RSS feed makes a huge psychological difference. The contents of an email newsletter feel like an Object, like A Spam, to me. Reading them as a feed just feels more natural and enjoyable. Even if you hate email newsletters, give it a go. Throw a donation to the developer if you love it too.
I do experience cosmetic formatting issues with Kill the Newsletter, but these don’t impact the readability.
Websites I follow this way are mostly normie stuff, local businesses and government institutions, and news websites.
Alternative front ends
Many major websites may have alternative front ends available. A front end is the user interface side of a website, the way a website is presented to visitors. The back end is the machine side of a website, the underlying data a website processes. An alternative front end is a way to view the back end data, in a way that’s designed by somebody who’s not the website’s owner. It’s the same contents but a different interface.[see: footnote 2] And sometimes these different interfaces support RSS feed, where the official front end does not.
So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. A Youtube user you like also uses Tiktok. Now, you don’t use Tiktok in this hypothetical, and Tiktok doesn’t support RSS feeds. But Tiktok has an alternative front end called Proxytok, that does support RSS feeds. Now, you can see all the videos just with your RSS feed.
I’ve also seen Tiktok described as unusable due to its algorithmically-generated feed being bothersome for potential users. If you do enjoy Tiktok videos and want to exclusively build your own feed, with no algorithm nonsense, you can do it with ProxyTok and RSS feeds.
My most-used alternative front end is Nitter. It’s a Twitter front end. I quit Twitter, for the normal reasons. But I can still follow all the same users on Twitter, without using Twitter. I get the back end stuff I like (microblogs from good posters), without the frontend stuff I hate. It also means Twitter can’t show me ads, or track my activity to sell to advertisers. I don’t financially contribute to Twitter’s ecosystem any more, which is great. It’s like i’m stealing Twitter, which I love doing.
There is a list of alternative front ends here. You want to click on the Main Instance or Public Instances links. The others are for advanced users, you don’t need to self-host or worry about onion links. Keep things simple unless you really, really want to make them complicated.
Not all alternative front ends support RSS feeds, though. You’ll have to research them (try using them) to find out.
Keep at it
I stopped using RSS feeds when everyone else did, when Google Reader shut down. When I first got back into RSS feeds, it wasn’t much to look at. I followed a few things. Feeds weren’t fast. This may be desirable for some people, but in the Google Reader days, I was checking my RSS feeds daily. I wanted that pace back, and was frustrated when it wasn’t. I was bored, I wanted to give up again. But now, I have the pace I want.
It must be so hard for people just starting out. It was probably hard for me starting in the Google Reader days, but I don’t remember. I went back and re-subscribed to feeds I remember having, I had a starting point. I don’t know how hard it would be for somebody with no starting point. But treat it like a project, and keep at it. You didn’t onboard to social media you like in a day, let the onboarding of RSS feeds take a while.
Here are some things I subscribe to, that a general audience might like.
- Blenderartists.org Forums: Finished Projects. Website | Feed
- Blender Artists is a forum for people who use the 3D software Blender. So its just a feed of indie CGI art, which is neat! A lot of artists here also have personal sites and portfolios, so it can be a good jumping off point for web surfing if this is your jam.
- albumoftheday Website | Feed
- It’s an album! Every day! Gonna unsub to this one, because it links to Spotify and I don’t use Spotify. u can have it instead
- Overclocked Remix Website | Feed
- Vidoe game music remixes.
- The News
- Whatever news you like here.
- FediVideo Website | Feed
- Curated list of variety video recommendations hosted on the fediverse platform Peertube.
These aren’t really for a general audience so much, are they. Ask me about the even more niche stuff in the comment’s if you like, ask me shit like “do you subscribe to any anime sites”. Except don’t ask that one because i’m answering it now with Jojo News Website | Feed.
Footnote 1. This image was taken from “RSS Autodiscovery” by Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin of the RSS Advisory Board
– https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20081106104156/http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Cheers!
Footnote 2. The explanation of alternative front-ends is stolen from:
“You Probably Want to Know About “Alternative Front-ends” by Justin Hanagan.
– https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20230522232310/https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
I just paraphrased this info to suit my post. Visit the original articles for more details and a more complete explanation, it’s a good article.
