I'm using RSS like it's 2010 again. Well, not exactly like 2010; in 2013 Google nuked its excellent RSS reader which was my tool of choice back then, this time I'm using an open source tool called Miniflux. There are other, probably better, readers out there but this one suits my needs. The Miniflux hosted service is $15/year. On laptop I can access Miniflux feeds from my browser, and on my phone I use Flux Feed, which runs $1.99. I know I'm swimming against the tide here, the main point of this exercise is to explore if using RSS in 2026 is feasible and what kind of content is out there and if can provide a better experience than the algorithmic feeds of social media.

Throttling

One of the main issue in choosing which feeds to follow, for me anyway, is that the volume of updates is just too high to keep up with. Algorithms solve this problem for you by deciding what to put in your feed. RSS doesn't work that way, when you subscribe to a content source of some sort, you see all the updates from that source, and you have to have some mechanism for dismissing each update in your feed whether you read it or not. In particular what I'm finding is that RSS is not a good choice for sources that have multiple updates per day. I don't have an effective strategy for those other than to avoid them.

Finding Feeds to Follow

• News. Some but not all news outlets publish RSS feeds directly. For ones that don't, they will have some form of social media presence that may or may not be followed with RSS. See the section on news sites below for some examples
• Fun / Hobbies. Some (most?) online forums allow subscribing to the entire forum or to individual topics. Try typing the topic URL into your RSS reader
• Society / Politics. Most official government people/departments/offices have RSS feeds of one kind or another, but these aren't always up to date or frequently updated. It is sometimes better to find their social media platform of choice, and if that platform supports some form of RSS feed, use that. See the section below on which platforms support RSS below.

RSS Support by Various Content Platforms

Platform	RSS Support
Blue Sky	Yes - just use the profile link in your RSS reader
Facebook	Not without an account and third party tools
Instagram	Not without an account and third party tools
Mastodon Social	Yes - use profile link
Reddit	Use URL for subreddit and add ".rss"
Threads	Not without an account and third party tools
Twitter/X	Not without an account and third party tools
YouTube	Yes - use URL for youtube account, then select any combination of videos, short videos, livestreams

Selected RSS Links

Source	RSS Feed
A Sound Life	https://listen1st.substack.com/feed
Democracy Docket	https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/feed/
Electronic Frontier Foundation	https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml
BBC World News	https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml
Hack-a-day	https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/
NPR World News
Retro Computing Roundtable	https://rcrpodcast.com/feed/podcast/