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RSS, and why its awesome

# The algorithmic feed as infohazard

Twitter, Facebook and others have all taken over the majority of human interaction online, and profit off of selling our attention to the highest bidder. There is another, more insidious side (if that's even possible) to this, in that this can also be used to drown out narratives that aren't conducive to the status quo, as well as push agendas that do. We must always be on guard and have the SIFT Method ready when seeing extraordinary claims or emotionally-heated topics trending online.

Although one does wonder if there is an alternative to all of this. And, like most things related to software, an open standard has already been defined for the usecase of just wanting to read the goddamn news or blogs of friends and interesting people.

Enter RSS.

RSS or "Really Simple Syndication", among other things, is a way for websites, normally news sites and blogs, to send content out as a feed. And yes, "feed" in this context is the same as the Twitter and Facebook kinds. But the feed is ultimately generated and curated by the algorithms that the megacorps control.

RSS gets rid of all that crap by simply taking a list of feeds, usually just links to XML files served over the internet, and then just displays the posts to you in chronological order. The only time AI was ever needed in creating a feed like this is for manipulating and selling peoples' attention.

Get yourself a feed reader

For Mobile (F-Droid Links)

Both of them support offline reading and background synchronization, which are the features that one should look for in an RSS reader.

For the UNIX (Linux, *BSD's, etc) command line

For PC desktop (Windows, Linux, MacOS)

I personally use Elfeed and Elfeed-Org to manage and browser RSS feeds from within Emacs as I spend most of my personal computing time within it.

Find yourself some feeds

After you have your RSS feed reader set up, it's time to fill the feed with content. Go to your favorite blogs and look for this symbol:

rss-icon

Or they might say something like "Subscribe via RSS" like this blog does. If you click on either, your RSS reader should pick it up or you get prompted to select your RSS reader to open said link.

Getting RSS feeds from Youtube, Reddit, etc

Being a link aggregator, getting RSS feeds from Reddit is fairly simple, just add .rss to the end of the subreddit or even username link, like so:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/.rss

And believe it or not, you can also get an RSS feed from youtube channels, but it takes a bit more doing:

  1. Go and get the Channel ID of the channel you want to follow

    When you open a youtube channel page, there should be what looks like gibberish at the end of the URL, after the `/` character:

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g => channel id is UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

  2. Append the channel ID to the link below

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

    You need to add the channel ID right after the = character, like so:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

  3. Add it to your chosen feed reader and enjoy!

    Plus points if you can configure your feed reader to play youtube videos in something like Invidious or youtube-dl

But then you might ask, if I hate megacorporations so much, why am I teaching folks how to get content from them? Mostly because we have to face the facts that these corporations and their government backers have so much control over our lives , both on- and offline. If there is a way we can lessen their influence over us, we should take it. Using RSS feeds as opposed to the algorithmically-made ones fed to us by the megacorps is one key step to doing that.

Here's some RSS feeds I follow

Some tech blogs I follow.

https://protesilaos.com/master.xml https://drewdevault.com/blog/index.xml https://100r.co/links/rss.xml https://computer.rip/rss.xml

Misc. blogs that I follow

https://tendigits.space/feed.xml https://grimgrains.com/links/rss.xml

Open Hardware and community platforms.

https://blog.freedombone.net/rss.xml https://www.opensourceecology.org/feed/rss/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PiKeeb.rss

Advocacy and analysis

https://bandilangitim.noblogs.org/?feed=rss http://libcom.org/rss.xml

Some news sites in my feed, although I tend to filter them out in the past few months to avoid doomscrolling. COVID19 and the Climate Crisis and all that.

http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews (dead) http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition_asia.rss https://www.aljazeera.com/xml/rss/all.xml

Subreddits I follow

https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/Brutalism.rss