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Any RSS feed recommendations that aren't news?
Just recently started getting into rss feeds. Have set up a feed reader and some feeds for my favorite sports team and some news sites and blogs that interest me. But whenever I look up some recommendations for new feeds to follow, I'd say 90%+ of the recommendations are news sites like the BBC or NYT as well as tech news sites.
Does anyone have any feed recommendations that aren't just news websites? Maybe an interesting blog or something entirely different? Thanks.
I'll drop an interesting one that I found right here on tildes a few days ago, about life in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi/
Oh so so many. All the links here are to the feeds directly, so you'll need to put the URL into your feed reader unless you just want to look at a bunch of XML. But DuckDuckGo should bring up the right site in the first hit or two if you search for the words in the hyperlink.
Arts & Culture:
Personal Blogs:
These are a dying breed on the web today, and most of my follows come from way back. But some still persist and are worth reading.
Food:
This category needs more filling out. Most of the blogs I used to follow have atrophied.
Gaming:
This category too needs populating. All the gaming publications seem to have either become nothing but ads, turned into lazy culture coverage/amateurish LitCrit instead of gaming news, or the feeds are simply too noisy. (For example Polygon's RSS feed updates for every new entry in a guide. So when Zelda came out I was getting an article for each and every shrine puzzle, each piece of armor, each weapon, each dungeon. It was simply too much and it was flooding my feed with spoilers.)
Long Reads:
My most fleshed out category, largely because these are mostly print magazines with a small digital presence.
Style:
Most style, menswear, and fashion bloggers have sadly decamped for Instagram and TikTok which is a shame. On the blogs people used to focus on the really nerdy details of garments and weaving, and how good clothes are put together. On the more visual mediums it tends to strictly be visual and, being as how Insta and TikTok are glorified ad platforms all the content is very BUY THIS NOW.
Tech:
I also have a whole pile of webcomics I don't feel like sifting through and linking. RSS was such a perfect distribution mechanism for webcomics and I'm vaguely annoyed that the WebToons platform, where much of the action seems to be happening, don't play nicely with it.
This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!
Edit: just coming back in to say that I've gone through each one of those and added about 6 or 7 of them to my feeds, so thanks again for the suggestions.
Thanks
Not a recommendation to something in particular, but I find lots of interesting blogs on https://substack.com/ (some have paywalls though)
And also there’s this helpful utility https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ that lets you turn email newsletters to RSS feeds so you can unclutter you inbox.
I've been meaning to find something like KTN for a while. Thanks!
Browsing through substack now and it looks to be very helpful, thanks!
Someone mentioned in another similar thread they have XKCD in their feed (comics thru RSS!) and I loved that idea to break things up.
I use RSS for webcomics, yeah! Xkcd, qc, erma, david revoys (it defaults to all his posts, not just pepper&carrot)
I do indeed follow the xkcd feed (as well as one or two other comics), should have mentioned that as well. But great suggestion!
If you want to try something different, I publish RSS feeds on a bunch of different topics where I curate highlights, high-quality comments etc. from across the internet.
The items are quick to go through because they are highlights, and if you find the highlight interesting, you can click through to read the entire source article / comment thread / book chapter (if you own the Kindle copy).
This is a really cool idea. Like an RSS-focused version of a Linkblog.
I was looking at Notado.app and trying to understand what it does. The site says that you can save content. Does it save material in your account, in case the original website disappears?
It saves the text of the highlighted content / saved comments to your account; I use the Wayback Machine alongside Notado to make backups of the URLs that those highlights/comments come from.
I hope it is okay to revive this 9 month old thread instead of asking a similar question again, but I found this and wanted to thank everyone for the good recommendations. I want to share a few myself and perhaps more people can chime in with new stuff. Most of my daily internet usage is practically done from my RSS reader now.
I follow a lot of tech related stuff - in addition to the regular news flow from Ars, Futurism and The Verge, I like these opinionated bloggers:
Where's Your Ed At - A very opinionated writer who is most recently known for being very critical of generative AI. He can be very one-sided, but his perspective is interesting none the less.
Garbage Day - While technically a newsletter, it does provide an RSS feed as well. As the blurb says it is a "newsletter about having fun online" with posts three days a week with various crazy stuff happening in the online world. Also mostly critical.
Electronic Frontier Foundation - The EFF is a well known non-profit digital rights group with frequent critical insights into various legislation affecting online privacy and rights.
IEEE Spectrum - A technology magazine run by IEEE. From aerospace to robotics to AI.
The Markup - Another non profit journalistic output covering technology and its impact for everyone.
Rest of the World - A magazine of sorts that especially covers how various technology trends affects the non-western world.
For general film related stuff I have IndieWire and Hollywood Reporter - though topic filtered feeds. More on that below. Also:
Subspace - A Star Trek substack of all things Trek related.
Movie Crash Course - Just someone watching through the 1001 Movies To See Before You Die.
I read a lot of science fiction short stories, so these output are worth my time:
Classics of science fiction - Very in depth reviews and reflections on classic science fiction stories.
The Astounding Analog Companion - Interviews with authors on their stories in the latest issue of the science fiction magazine Analog
From Earth to the Stars - Same as above but for their sister magazine Asimov's.
Tangent Online - Reviews of the latest science fiction magazines and online outputs.
For general all around topic I enjoy following these:
Nieman Lab - Run by the journalism institution of Harvard University covering many interesting aspects of journalism in general.
The Atlantic - Well, the classic magazine that has been around since 1857.
All of the above should have easily available feeds which can be detected by https://getrssfeed.com/ but sometimes it can be a good idea to dig a little deeper into the HTML source of the website since not all sites are good at making their different filtered feeds easily available. For example, IndieWire publishes a lot of stories every day, but besides their general feed - each subcategory has their own feed like
https://www.indiewire.com/c/features/feed/for features article. Same applies for The Guardian which as a news publication has too much in their general feed, but I subscribe to a handful of specific topics likehttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai/rssfor AI stuff. On a last note, checkout Comics RSS for unofficial RSS feeds of tons of comics.Necropost away! I'm glad the thread is still useful to someone months after I originally posted it.
Those are great recommendations, I just clicked through each one and found a couple that I've added to my feeds, so thanks!
I've actually been thinking about posting a followup to this (basically the same question again, to try and get new feeds to follow), as I'm always open to learning new things.
Back when I posted this thread, I got a lot of great recommendations. I checked every single one of them, followed some, but ended up unsubscribing from some of them after a while (felt that they didn't fit well with my style of content consumption, or just didn't particularly enjoy the content as much as I thought I would). Here are some of the ones that I've stuck to this whole time and still read regularly, many of which I got recommended from this thread or others like it:
https://feeds.kottke.org/main - Interesting blog about all sorts of stuff. Lots of posts, most can be ignored but then every now and then there'll be something super interesting in one of the posts that leads me down a rabbit hole of something that pokes at my interests
https://mcmansionhell.com/rss - Blog about over-the-top mansions in the US and how ridiculous they are
https://patrickwitty.substack.com/feed - Incredible insight into some of the most famous photographs in history, as well as photos that might one day become remembered as such
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/feed/ - Has helped me find tons of new and up-coming games and demos to try. There are so many games being released nowadays that it's overwhelming to try and find something you like. RPS weeds through a ton of them so I can focus on the ones that seem really good to me.
There's a ton others, like webcomics and other niche blogs and sites tailored to my specific hobbies and interests, but these ones above are some of the best ones that I'd recommend to anyone.
Hoping you don't mind me asking here, surely some googling could net me a decent answer but since we're here...
I love this idea! Moving away from Reddit last year to Tildes has been such a freeing experience. I don't doom scroll anymore. I enjoy the closer knit feeling of this community and get more from the comments here. I also use Ground News for my news but sometimes find the lack of comments frustrating as my inner monologue processes the absurdity of some of the stories.
RSS feeds sound right up my alley and remind me of the old newsgroups I browsed in the 90's. So I guess my questions are: what are RSS feeds to you and why do like them? Also, what programs/apps do you use? I'm not necessarily looking for a step by step tutorial but as you've clearly put some time and thought into this I'm just hoping to glean some insight into how to approach it. Thanks!
I use the free version of inoreader, but there are tons of feed readers out there. I just needed one that I could use both on a browser and on my phone, and liked inoreader the best of the ones I researched. Have used it since I posted this question and felt no reason to switch.
I started using feeds for a similar reason to you. I was disappointed in reddit and after over a decade there, felt like I really needed to stop using it for my own mental sanity. So I quit it cold turkey and replaced it with rss feeds for time-killing and tildes for social interaction. Both have worked great and have made me a much more positive person online.
Some of my feeds (like that RPS one) post multiple times per day, which I periodically peruse through to see if anything catches my eye, so they feel more like the home page of reddit where there might be dozens of posts but you just browse through til you find something you want to delve deeper in. I follow a Smithsonian Magazine feed that's similar to this. Multiple posts per day, sometimes about something that interests me, and sometimes about something that I don't care too much about.
Then there are other feeds that serve more like old-school twitter where you'd follow specific people or things. Like I follow the steam pages for some of my favorite games, EU4/CK3/VIC3, so I get a post whenever the devs make an update or talk about a new feature or something. Or some of the blogs I follow, like that McMansion one or the photography one, only post once every few weeks or even months. So I get a little hit of dopamine when I see there's a new post there and almost always read them.
I have my feeds broken up by sections but also by length of read, like some are quick webcomics that I can read in 10 seconds while others are full-blown articles that might take 20 minutes to parse through. This lets me see what I want to see depending on the amount of time that I have to spare. But of course RSS feeds and readers are endlessly customizable these days so you can organize them however makes sense for you.
Hope that helps!
Oh and I forgot to mention: I use an extension for firefox called want my rss that lets me take the rss feed from any site that has one available. Some sites are more obvious with their feeds than others, but that extension lets me take feeds from most sites that I use or come across, not all though. There are lots of programs out there that create feeds for you but many require a sign-up if not full-blown payment for their services. So I just stick to the stuff that I can get with the extension.
This was amazing, thank you! I'm all set up and look forward to exploring new content and ideas.
Since you also came from reddit, I found that it helped me to think of each feed like a subreddit. And it's totally okay to unsubscribe from ones you don't like any more. When I first started out, I subscribed to a lot of different feeds to try them out, then quickly realized that I disliked the ones with too many posts per day/hour, so I unsubscribed from those and have felt a lot more interested in checking my feeds since. Periodically I'll find a new feed that I think might be interesting, subscribe to it, then realize months later that I never actually click on anything from that feed. Or I might subscribe to a webcomic because I saw a funny comic posted somewhere else, but then when I subscribe to the feed, every other post is a paid exclusive or only available on a separate site, so I unsubscribe from those as well.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that my feed now is a lot different than my feed from a few months ago. I've slowly been curating it to my specific tastes and style of media consumption. So if you get frustrated or bored with your feeds after a couple of days or weeks, try to figure out why that is and then rectifying it should be as simple as removing a feed or two, or creating a new folder to split up your feeds in a different way.
Good luck!
Piggybacking on this thread to ask if someone had any success integrating tildes and groups in their RSS feeds? I tried adding the site's url to no avail (the current posts even load on my feed, thei just not update when there is something new).
It looks like Tildes uses Atom feeds. I couldn't find anything in the docs but I played with it a bit and it looks like this is a format.
If you look at the URL for a top level group, it might look like this
https://tildes.net/~artsthe atom feed just adds/topics.atomto the end of it,https://tildes.net/~arts/topics.atom.Now for tags it's a little different. You add the tags as a search, after the
.atomsohttps://tildes.net/~arts?tag=art.generativeis the normal URL for the tagarts.generativeandhttps://tildes.net/~arts/topics.atom?tag=art.generativeis the Atom feed URL you would put in your RSS reader.Is that what you have been using? I only just played with this today so I don't know if it has problems updating or anything. my RSS reader reads some of these URLs back to 50 posts and had new posts from just a few minutes ago as well.
I did this exactly, and my RSS server got as far as 40 topics, even the new ones. It just does not retrieve any new post after that :(
I'm gonna add
https://tildes.net/topics.atom?order=newto my reader. I'll update if I see new posts coming in.Alright, update time. It grabbed new posts after an hour. In this case there were 7 new posts to all of tildes in that hour.
I'm using Inoreader as my RSS reader. I am also using their paid Pro tier but I don't think that would change anything in this case. What RSS reader do you use?
I've found the problem: my RSS server (The Old Reader) auto refresh feeds at different rates, so for something like groups in Tildes it would have a daily refresh rate or something like that. The thing is, I was refreshing manually on my RSS clients (newsboat & FeedMe) and wondering why new posts were not appearing, when I had to refresh manually on the server for that to happen.
Seems like it didn't update immediately. Rss by common courtesy only updates once an hour. Some readers can be forced to update more often but it isn't encouraged
Exactly, I was expecting the one hour wait time.
Ah sorry thought you were not expecting that, seems i got confused who had the problems here.
I have an extension for firefox that allows me to find feeds for any site that has them available and here is an example of what it has turned up for ~games
Thanks for the suggestion, will look into it!
These are some of my favorites in my own feed aggregator:
And then not a specific recommendation, but ooh! directory has become my go-to resource to find new and interesting blogs. It can take a bit of hunting to find something that tickles your fancy, but there are a ton of them indexed and everything is categorized and organized quite nicely so it's not too hard to poke around.
Curious if this is just an issue with my RSS reader. The
Brrposts don't seem to propagate properly into my feed. Instead I need to click on them to go to through to the original post.I'm using FreshRSS if that matters.
I think that one does not include the post content in the RSS feed. The reader I use (Miniflux) has an option called "Fetch original content" that you can enable per feed which will attempt to scrape the content from the site when fetching new articles which works pretty well. FreshRSS may have something similar.
The reasons a blog or other website would choose not to include the content (or at least not all of the content) in their RSS feed is usually because they need readers to actually visit their blog in order to make any ad revenue. I figure I'm using an ad blocker anyway, so they're not losing anything when I do it, and also I regularly donate money (via donate links or patreon) to creators and authors that I choose to support to make up for the fact that I'm dodging their ads by all means possible.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Two of my favorite blogs are In the Pipeline (rss) and John D. Cook’s blog (rss). Those two people not only have - but also use - the rare ability to explain really complex topics to laypeople like me, without dumbing it down.
A little late to respond, but....
My Newsblur account is over 300 feeds, but many are no longer active, so I'm guessing ~100 active ones. I've been using it since the Google Reader Massacre, so plenty of time for cruft to accrue.
A sampling (links to sites, not feeds)
Newsblur also provides an email address I can forward newsletters to, so I have a few things showing up that way, plus some subscriptions using Kill The Newsletter. It also supports Twitter user streams as a feed, although I've found those hard to follow since it strips what's being replied to or re-tweeted.
If you go to Newsblur's site, there should be a option like "try it out." That page has a few popular feeds showing up, you might find some interesting stuff there.
Thanks! I'll check these out.
I know am WAY late to the party but I have been trying to get into RSS as a way of decreasing the amount of time I spend “wasting” on social media, but still wanting to get that little dopamine hit from opening up an app and learning new stuff or seeing new content. I’m not super familiar with RSS feeds, beyond them being “content aggregators”, and I have been kind of overwhelmed with trying to get started.
What is the best RSS reader for a “beginner”? And what is the best way to get one started for myself? Say I want to add all the links posted in this topic…do I just add them all into the reader and then I’m good to go? How do I go about filtering the content and siphoning through the clutter that I end up not wanting to view?
cfabbro gave some good recommendations above/below, but I literally just replied to someone in this very thread with a similar question to yours, so I'll link you my answer here.
tl;dr I use Inoreader which I found has worked well for me. It's very simple to use, but also customizable. And free which is always nice. I get rss feeds from an extension that I have on my firefox browser and just periodically find new rss feeds for sites that I visit or want to return to.
I started off with only a few sections about a year ago (tech, sports, history, webcomics, and some miscellaneous blogs) but have grown the number of feeds I follow significantly in that time. I've found that I don't really like feeds that post too frequently, which includes some of the major news outlets (even tech ones). A couple times a day is the limit for me and even then its only like two or three feeds that I have like that. Most others are once a day or a couple of posts per week. And then a bunch post infrequently like once every two months or so, but those are always fun surprises when I see an unread post from them.
It's might be worth making a new text topic (leave the link blank, but fill in title and text) in ~tech asking for help/advice about this, since not everyone sorts by Activity-All Time, so your comment here (which is on a pretty old post) might not get seen by many people.
But to answer your questions, I can't speak for every RSS reader and which is "best", but I used to use Mozilla Thunderbird for email and RSS, and it has pretty good sorting/filtering/tagging options. For a guide, see: Thunderbird + RSS: How To Bring Your Favorite Content To The Inbox, or How to Subscribe to News Feeds and Blogs
p.s. Tildes actually has RSS feeds built into it which you can add/subscribe to in your preferred RSS reader.
Main page (which includes all content from every group):
https://tildes.net/topics.rss
Or ones for each individual group if you prefer to be more selective:
https://tildes.net/~anime/topics.rss
https://tildes.net/~arts/topics.rss
https://tildes.net/~books/topics.rss
https://tildes.net/~comics/topics.rss
Etc.
Two above columns I love and can't get enough of:
Ask A Manager - by an HR manager. WAY more interesting than it sounds, and really improved my job searching skills and my confidence in pushing back against poor treatment.
Captain Awkward - more general advice, really thoughtful and compassionate responses, lots of great advice in the archives.
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
Most of the ones I've used or tried are basically news or updates on website related things.
I think this isn't what you're looking for but for sports tech dcrainmaker.com is a well known resource.
It's mostly reviews, news and some infrequent blog entries but if you're into cycling, running or any other sport tech this is the place to look at first.
Edit: i reread your post it seems this is clearly not what you're looking for. But somehow can't delete it. Flag /OT
Hey no worries, though it may not apply to me, maybe someone else that finds this thread could benefit from it. It's a good suggestion for anyone into running or cycling who wants to stay up-to-date on the latest tech!
It's me, I'm the one, it's me!
I have followed DCRainmaker for a long time and enjoy his articles but don't read all of them. As someone also looking to find new RSS feeds, it's great to be reminded that I can add one for his! Thanks @allgedo
The system works!