5 things you didn’t know you could add to your RSS feed
RSS is older than most of what we use on the Internet every day. It’s older than Facebook, older than this website, and as old as Google. And it remains very widely used because it is extremely useful.
It turns out that RSS isn’t just for organizing a feed of articles or social media posts. There are a ton of things you can use with RSS.
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1. Track GitHub projects and release updates
For developers and tech enthusiasts alike, staying informed about software dependencies or interesting open source projects often means drowning in email notifications or obsessively checking repository pages. This can quickly become extremely time-consuming. However, GitHub quietly supports RSS, allowing you to monitor project activity with granular accuracy without ever visiting the site. Although the platform encourages users to use the internal “Watch” functionality, this often results in a cluttered notification inbox, filled with minor threads that bury important updates. With RSS, however, you can filter out that noise and receive updates in a passive, organized timeline alongside your news and other reading materials.
Perhaps the most practical application is software version tracking. Most repositories automatically generate an Atom feed for their releases, accessible by adding the correct path to the repository URL. The standard format follows the pattern of the website address followed by the specific user and repository name, ending with a releases.atom suffix. This provides a clean feed of official version releases only, with release notes and changelogs. This is especially useful for tracking libraries or tools where you only care about stable updates rather than daily development work.
2. Following any subreddit or Reddit search
Reddit is one of the most active news sources on the Internet, but its user interface encourages doom scrolling and casual fighting. For those who want to extract information from Reddit without interacting with its gamified elements or chaotic comment sections, the platform offers robust, if poorly advertised, RSS support. This allows users to turn high-volume subreddits into a linear news ticker, ensuring no headlines are missed while avoiding the need to open the app or website. This method effectively decouples content from community interaction, which is ideal for power users who view Reddit strictly as a news aggregator.
Each public subreddit has a native feed accessible by simply adding an .rss extension to the end of the URL. For example, going to the “new” tab of a subreddit and adding this suffix creates a real-time feed of each incoming submission. This is exceptionally useful for moderators or news junkies who need to see news the second it is posted, rather than waiting until it is upvoted enough to appear on a “Hot” or “Best” page. This functionality even extends to search queries. By searching Reddit and adding the RSS suffix to the results URL, you can create a persistent monitor for specific keywords, brand mentions, or niche topics across the entire platform.
A major limitation to consider is that many modern applications and RSS aggregators struggle to validate Reddit feeds due to the platform’s strict rate-limiting and bot protection measures. Additionally, these apps rarely auto-discover feeds, meaning you can’t just type in the subreddit name. You must manually formulate the URL, including the secure protocol and correct extension. But if you can make it work, that’s pretty cool.
3. Subscribe to YouTube Creators Without Using the Algorithm
Lucas Gouveia / Justin Duino / How-To Geek
YouTube’s interface is designed to keep you glued, prioritizing algorithmic recommendations over the specific content you’re subscribed to. The “Subscription” tab exists, but it’s often cluttered with “Shorts” or buried under a user interface that invites distraction. It turns out that it is indeed possible to return to a classic, chronological consumption model, and for this, YouTube channels actually generate RSS feeds. You can’t really go back to the good old days, but this is probably the closest thing you can get.
Using these feeds reestablishes the relationship between viewer and creator to a simple notification system: when a video is uploaded, it appears in your player. That’s it. There’s no algorithm to sort the order, no A/B testing of thumbnails to distract you, and no sidebar enticing you to click. Pretty cool, right?
The structure of these feeds is not really intuitive and requires a specific URL format pointing to the platform’s feed directory. The essential component of this URL is the channel ID. Recently, YouTube has moved to using user-friendly handles in browser bars, which hide the underlying unique identifier required for RSS. To subscribe via RSS, you cannot use the creator’s custom name. Instead, you need to locate the channel’s unique identifier string, usually starting with “UC”, which can often be found in the page’s source code or through the “About” sections of the channel’s page. Once this identifier is added to the correct stream URL structure, the result is an XML file containing video metadata.
Most modern RSS readers won’t find this feed if you simply paste the link to the YouTube channel’s home page, because the site doesn’t advertise RSS autodiscovery tags in a way that all readers can scan. Therefore, you have to do the manual work of extracting the ID and creating the link. If you miss the old YouTube, it’s probably worth it.
4. Follow Mastodon and other federated social publications
The rise of fediverse and platforms like Mastodon have reintroduced the concept of the open social web and, rightly so, these platforms have excellent native interoperability with RSS. Most closed social networks partition data to prevent scraping by third parties, but Mastodon instances are built on open protocols that treat content accessibility as a feature. This means that almost any public profile on a Mastodon instance can be turned into an RSS feed.
Accessing these feeds is generally simple. For most instances running standard Mastodon software, adding .rss to the end of a user’s profile URL will generate a feed of their public posts. This capability extends beyond individual users to hashtags. If you go to a tag’s timeline and apply the same suffix, you can create a news feed focused on a specific topic, conference, or event.
Because different instances may run different branches of the software or have strict privacy settings enabled, the autodiscovery features of RSS readers often fail. Simply pasting a user’s profile link may not work if the instance administrator has disabled certain public endpoints or if the playback software does not know how to query that specific server. Again, as with most other items on this list, you have to create the link manually.
In the modern web landscape, the orange RSS icon has largely disappeared from headers and footers. Many contemporary web designers and developers assume that users rely solely on social networks for updates, leading them to hide or remove visible links to RSS feeds. However, this does not always mean that technology is absent. A large number of websites are built on CMS like WordPress, Ghost or Drupal, which automatically generate RSS feeds by default. Even if a site claims not to support RSS, the feed may still exist, but simply be hidden.
The first step in monitoring these “no feed” sites is to guess common URL structures. Adding simple suffixes such as /feed, /rss or .xml to the main domain or a specific category page will often reveal a valid XML file. For example, a company blog that appears to be a static page might actually be a WordPress installation where the feed resides on a standard endpoint, completely invisible to the casual browser.
When a website is truly static or built as a single-page application (SPA) without any underlying flow architecture, it’s not necessarily the end of the world. There are options. Services like FetchRSS or open source projects like RSSHub can be used to generate feeds on the fly. These tools work by retrieving the visual HTML structure of a web page (looking for repeated patterns such as titles and timestamps) and converting that data into a standardized RSS format. Your mileage may vary with this approach, but it might work well for your setup.
RSS is extremely useful these days if you know how to use it. And with these tips, you will definitely enjoy it to the fullest.
