Follow websites, blogs, podcasts and people you like with a RSS reader
Last edited in February 2025
You don’t need an account with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other social media platforms to “follow” your interests on the web, whether that be people, organisations, news, podcasts, blogs, etc.
The “follow” button was not invented by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other social media platform.
Neither were feeds.
Feeds (or RSS1) have been a feature of the web since 19992.
Most websites have a “feed” or a “RSS feed” or “RSS” or an “Atom feed”.
What is RSS?
RSS allows a user to subscribe to receive notifications from websites when there is new content published (e.g. articles, podcasts, etc). Inversely, RSS allows a website to let subscribers receive updates they publish content: a new blog post, article, podcast, or picture etc.
For the last decade or so, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram have been the middle-men between followers and followees.
As the middle-men those platforms grant themselves the rights to decide what you see. Not only, these middle-men have also cluttered your feeds with advertisements, unsolicited news and unwanted notifications.
RSS empowers you to get rid of the middle-man.
You can create and curate your own feed.
No more algorithms governed by commercial interests, no more advertisements.
A few more perks of RSS:
- you can read offline directly from your RSS reader
- you can transfer articles to your e-reader
- you no longer need to go to websites one by one to fetch articles etc
How to follow RSS feeds?
Essentially, there are two steps:
download a RSS reader on your phone and/or laptop
subscribe to RSS feeds of websites you like
Note:
‘RSS feed’ is the timeline that’s published on a website.
You can open this file: https://yctct.com/feed.rss to see what an RSS feed/timeline looks like.
‘RSS reader’ is the application you use to subscribe to RSS feeds.
Download a RSS reader
There are many RSS readers you can use.
Edit: Back then when I wrote this blog post I used NetNewsWire; today, I would pick an application that’s copyleft-licensed such as FreshRSS, sismics, RSS Guard, Tiny Tiny RSS, Feeder - and I would check that the app I pick does not incorporate telemetry (i.e. send data usage to a remote server).
For this example, I will use NetNewsWire.
Download NetNewsWire from their website.
Subscribe to RSS feed(s)
All you have to do to add an RSS feed to your RSS reader is to copy the URL of the website which RSS feed you want to subscribe to NetNewsWire.3
Below is how to do step by step.
Click on the ‘+’ sign at the top-left of the RSS reader
Paste the URL of the website you would like to subscribe to, and click ‘Add’
Here you go! All new updates will show up in that feed.
You can test with:
More about RSS:
- Build a webpage with multiple RSS entries (on the same page)
- Follow a Youtube channel with RSS
- Save an article from newsboat’s RSS reader to an .epub file
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