RSS Feeds

What are RSS Feeds?

An RSS feed is a timeline that shows updates from things you want to follow -- similar to a social media feed you'd use on Twitter or Facebook. Only, instead of the updates on your feed being limited to Twitter or Facebook, you can see updates from any website on the internet.

The "RSS" part stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is just a fancy way of saying "universal"-- you can have an unlimited number of feeds from any website on the internet. There are no limits. You can add anything to your collection of feeds you want to follow: updates on your favorite websites, new articles posted on a news website, reviews for a company on Yelp, new arrivals from your favorite online store--you can even follow your favorite people on social media--all aggregated into one single chronological feed for you to consume at our leisure.

Why Use RSS feeds

Consume Web Content on Your Own Terms

RSS feeds give you a single, chronological list of all updates made to a collection of apps or websites (usually in real-time) that you can read at your convenience without having to constantly check each app and website individually. This gives you more control over the amount of content you consume and helps to avoid doom scrolling, and it's negative effects. Instead of constantly being pinged with notifications, you control when you're notified of new content published. You can also group and consolidate feed content into folders to avoid being overwhelmed with too much content at one time.

Your Online Habits Stay Private

When we use RSS feeds, the news and updates appear right in the feed without having to ever visit the website or app. This makes it impossible for companies to snoop on your preferences, habits, and behaviors.

Avoid Being Manipulated by Tech Companies

Without RSS feeds, you'd otherwise have to use the website and apps built by Big Tech to consume their content. This makes it extremely easy for them to control what we see, the content we consume, and how we consume it. But the content in RSS feeds is free of faulty and aggressive algorithms that manipulate your feed, flood you with irrelevant ads, or prioritize featured or paid content over content that's more relevant to you.

How to Use RSS Feeds

Before you can start using RSS feeds, you'll need an RSS Reader app, which will make viewing and consuming RSS feeds a lot easier. Once you've picked and installed an RSS Reader app on your laptop or mobile device, you can begin adding RSS feeds to it and automatically get real-time updates and notifications as the RSS feeds are updated with new content.

RSS Readers

There are many RSS Reader applications available. Listed below are a few we recommend.

How to Find RSS Feeds

To find the RSS Feed for a website, just navigate to the website and the RSS feed for it is usually located at the domain of the website followed by /rss.xml, /rss or /atom.xml. For example, the RSS feed for this website is located at https://openrss.org/rss.

Browser Add-ons

Having to manually search for an RSS feed for every website can be daunting. Luckily, there are many browser extensions available that will auto-detect RSS feeds on websites as soon as you visit them. A few of them are listed below.

RSS Feed Generators

If you find that a website you want to follow doesn't have an RSS feed available, you can request that we provide one for you to use. Alternatively, you can also use one of the following services to generate one.

Email Newsletter-to-Feed Services

Sometimes you may want to have email newsletters sent to you converted to RSS feeds. Here are some services that will generate RSS feeds from newsletter emails.