rss is cool and im going to tell you what/why/how ok
this site has an rss feed! rss is 20+ year old standard that allows for posting/receiving site summaries, updates and posts in a simple text and image format. this makes it really good for:
- getting blog updates from random blogs/sites i find interesting, many wordpress sites enable rss
- keeping track of my friends on different platforms without having to log in or even make an account, tumblr blogs come built in with rss feeds and thats all i use!
- using it as an opt in mailing list, youtube channels have rss feeds that get posted when videos go up
you only get content you subscribe to with no algorithms making it a no signup, ad free and opt in alternative to social media
iris how do i actually start using rss
to receive and read rss feeds, you need an rss reader, heres a few that i tried, note most rss readers support features like letting you categorise feeds, import/export feeds and categories between different readers via opml , and reading feeds in different views like full or truncated content, or just linking out to the source website
feeder
- android
- free and open source
- not much to say about this, its simple, competent and easy to use on the go
fluent reader
- windows, mac, linux
- free and open source
- quite customisable, with the ability to change the view of feeds, sync with cloud rss services like inoreader if you care
- has an android app too but i havent tried it
*my screenshot looks a bit weird because i have a fork that i customised but all the functionality is there
thunderbird
- windows, linux, mac, android
- free and open source (mozilla)
- yes that thunderbird, the email client. i dont know why they did this but its apparently fairly competent, with full in app webviews etc. though the email client rolled in felt too much, and the ui felt a bit overwhelming when i tried it
adding feeds
the ui may differ but all rss readers need feed urls, these are links to xml files (like html but the tags are just for storing any old data) that get updated with the feed content. if a site is nice them might provide a link to the feed url directly on the page (mines in the header :)), sometimes with a little signal icon (ill get there)
you can then paste the feed url into your reader and start receiving content from the feed
some sites are sneaky about their rss feeds and wont have a button for it (thanks tumblr). there are ways to extract these feed urls from the html (theyre usually linked via a <link> tag) but in researching for this post ive actually found a cool browser extension to do this for you!
get rss feed url
get rss feed url is an aptly named extension for firefox and chrome (and edge but idc) that fetches any declared rss feeds for you. in my time using it its drastically improved the convenience of adding feeds from platforms with hidden rss feeds like tumblr or mastodon
honorable mention also to awesome rss for firefox as suggested by aether , which adds a nicely integrated rss button to the firefox url bar when a site has rss (apparently it used to do that idk)
social media platforms HATE this one trick
clearly, a surprising amount of sites have rss! that said, if a company wants to make money off a social media platform, they actively would not want this given it works against locking you into a platform
- twitter (and facebook but idc) had a rss feeds that have since been removed
- bluesky has an rss feed! but it is text only at time of writing, i dont think this is hostile on purpose but its hard to say theres much incentive for them to fix it
its a shame that corporations dont want to support an open standard so they can milk ad revenue and data collection money, but that makes keeping rss relevant and in demand more important than ever
i hope my little writeup helps you consider using rss, its a technology ive found a surprising amount of genuine convenience and use in which i cant really always say about the tech shit i get up to, and its helping me develop a better attitude around my social media usage and presence ⭐