Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

Table of contents

1. What is RSS or Atom
2. Feed readers
3. Finding feeds
4. Meetups and events
5. YouTube and PeerTube channels
6. Podcasts
7. Social media and Fediverse accounts
8. Newsletters
9. Blogs and website posts
10. Websites without a feed
11. Discovering new content
12. Search
13. Curation and recommendation
14. Conclusion

January 18, 2025

With most online platforms, it’s becoming more and more difficult to view a feed of content that is not generated by an algorithm whose purpose it is to keep you engaged. Often, these algorithms are a black box where you don’t know why certain content is being promoted, let alone have full control over the content you consume. The incentives and needs of those controlling the algorithms are different from your own. Platforms may seek to politically influence you or sell you something you don’t need. Platforms may change hands, changing the influence they wish to have on their users. The good news is RSS and Atom offer a decentralized alternative.

Decentralization is becoming more popular as people are growing increasingly frustrated with centralized social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Reddit. Protocols such as ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AtProto give people more control over their data, identity, and content feeds. Allowing people to consume the content that they want to consume, in a way that works for them.

RSS and Atom are feed formats used to subscribe to content on the web.
They are decentralized by nature. A feed allows publishers to publish the content on their website for others to consume, using any client they wish to use. The producer of content doesn’t get to dictate how you consume it. Want to filter out content matching certain keywords? You can do that. Want to choose which content has priority over other content? You can do that. By using an open and decentralized standard, you can take back control over what content you consume and how you consume it.

Feed readers

To consume the content on an RSS or Atom feed, you need a client. There are many different options available. Web applications you can self-host like Miniflux and FreshRSS. And native clients like NetNewsWire for macOS and iOS and Feeder for Android. There are even command line clients like Newsboat for those who like to live in their terminal.

And while I would recommend, in the spirit of owning your data, self-hosting your own reader, FreshRSS has hosted instances you can use if you don’t know how to setup and host your own application.

Finding feeds

Many websites will include an HTML tag linking to their feed.

You can find these by looking at the source code of a page. Some RSS/Atom clients can do this for you. Or you can use a tool like RSS Lookup.

Meetups and events

I like using RSS to stay up to date with meetups and events happening in my area.

Meetup.com doesn’t link to their feed, but there is an RSS feed you can find on the events page by adding /rss to the path. E.g. https://www.meetup.com/MEETUP-NAME/events/rss.

YouTube and PeerTube channels

You can get notified of new videos without having a YouTube account or subscribing.

You can follow YouTube channels with this endpoint:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

And you can also subscribe to YouTube playlists:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLIST_ID

Peertube has a “Subscribe via RSS” option behind the subscribe button on channel pages.

Podcasts

Postcasts use RSS to distribute episodes. You can find links to a podcast’s feed on the podcast website or on directory sites like podcastindex.org.

Social media and Fediverse accounts

You can follow Bluesky accounts with RSS. You can also subscribe to communities on Reddit or the Fediverse. Lemmy has a link to the feed for a community on the community overview page where you can even set the sorting of a feed, e.g. by sorting by active or controversial posts.

For Reddit, you can add .rss to the community name. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted.rss

Newsletters

If you want to subscribe to a newsletter without cluttering your inbox or without sharing your e-mail address, you can use
Kill the Newsletter. It allows you to create an email address you then use to sign up to newsletters with. It will turn the incoming e-mails into an RSS feed.

Blogs and website posts

Many websites offer a feed with their latest posts. I have a page with the feeds on this website.

Websites without a feed

For websites without a feed, you can use PolitePol to scrape the website and generate a feed. Or you can reach out to the owner of the website and ask them to implement a feed.

Discovering new content

One of the trade-offs of avoiding proprietary algorithms and going with a decentralized alternative is that it can be harder to discover content. I hope feed readers will get smarter and start including technology that will optimize and curate your feeds in a way that is beneficial to you. There are still a lot of opportunities for recommendation and personalization algorithms in this space.

I’ll share some ways I use to find new websites to subscribe to.

Search

If you know what kind of content you’re looking for, search is a great way to find it. Marginalia search focuses on results that are non-commercial. And aboutideasnow.com crawls the /about, the /ideas, and the /now pages of over 3000 personal websites.

Curation and recommendation

Some people have a blogroll on their website curating the feeds that are interesting to them. You can follow communities that post stuff related to your interests. Or you can follow people on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Directories like 1mb.club, 512kb.club, and ooh.directory are great ways to find new personal websites to subscribe to. And they all publish a feed with recently added sites.

Conclusion

Break free from walled gardens and opaque recommendation algorithms. Use RSS to have more control and be more intentional with your media consumption. If you publish content, make sure to also publish a feed so people can discover your content without relying on third parties. Let’s build decentralized systems together so we can break the cycle of enshittification on platforms we don’t own.

Feel free to let me know how you use RSS and which feeds you enjoy.

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