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>HairyDiode                                             

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Return to Traditional Doomscrolling with RSS                          12-25-2025
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If you're tired of google and meta shoving ai generated slop and tabloid media
in your face all the time, RSS is the solution for you. Although personally I
think the real solution is to stop using the internet, but that's impractical
for now. 

RSS is an old standard for websites to publish updates into a feed that was
mostly used by news media. With a little coaxing you can get it to work with
almost anything from youtube channels to wikipedia. This way you can aggregate
only the content you want into one place in an RSS reader all without any
curation by google or meta. 


The main trouble with using RSS in 2025 is that even though the RSS feeds still
exist, it's very hard to find the link to them.  I suspect the majority of RSS
feeds function simply because nobody running these sites today even know they
exist and therefore haven't bothered to turn them off. Here's my guide to
finding RSS links:

Old Reliable]=---
	Just add feed, or rss to the url, works for most sites, especially if
	it's a wordpress site. The people running the site are probably
	unaware of this functionality so YMMV
	ex: https://securelist.com/feed

Traditional Media]=---
	It used to be that they all had big shiny buttons that say RSS on every
	page. Now it takes a bit of searching around for these pages.
	ex: https://www.latimes.com/california/rss2.0.xml

Squarespace Sites]=---
	Find their news or blog page, and add ?format=rss to the end
	ex: https://example.net/blog?format=rss

Wikimedia]=---
	There's a wikimedia plugin that turns page updates as well as curated
	pages into an rss feed more info here.
	ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=featuredfeed&feed=featured
Wikidot]=---
	A similar less documented plugin exists for wikidot sites
	ex: http://community.wikidot.com/feed/pages/category/
	You can narrow things down past category/  depending on the structure of the
	wikidot site itself
	
Substack and Wordpress]=---
	RSS is built into both, so adding feed to the end of a
	wordpress/substack site always works
	ex: https://your.substack.com/feed
Youtube]=---
	Youtube used to have an RSS button, but nowadays you just have to dig
	through the page source to find the vestigial link. It looks something
	like:
	ex: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ
	You can also use invidious, which has a big shiny RSS button still.
	ex: https://yewtu.be/feed/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ
RSSHub]=---
	Finally, we have the heavy hitter, RSSHub, which is a distributed
	service that generates RSS updates for everything from AP News to
	Instagram accounts.
	Documentation
	ex: https://rsshub.rss.tips/apnews/topics/apf-topnews
Last Resort]=---
	RSS Readers like newsboat allow you to write your own scraper scripts
	that turn html into rss. These run locally.
	ex: go read the manpages

The RSS Standard itself is actually really simple, it's just an xml file that
looks something like this:

<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<title>hairydiode.xyz</title>
		<link>https://hairydiode.xyz</link>
		<description>Haoran S. Diao Personal Site</description>
		<item>
			<title>Return to Traditional Doomscrolling with RSS</title>
			<link>https://hairydiode.xyz/rss</link>
			<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

	...

That the RSS reader checks periodically. Naturally I added an RSS feed to this
site by modifying gen.sh. The hardest part was looking at code I wrote when I
was 16. The only real caveat is to make sure to use RFC 822 for the date format.
The full RSS spec can be found here.

                                                                               
                                                                               
                       RSS R  S SRS   SRS  SRS SRS  SRSS RSS  RSSR             
                      S    S  R S  S R    S    S  R  S   S  R S                
   .-----------.      SRS  S  R SSR  SSR  S    SRS   S   RSS  RSSR             
  /  ________.  \        S S  R S  S    R S    S  R  S   S  R S                
  | |         \ |     SRS   SR  SSR  SSR   SSR S  S RSSR SSR  SSRS             
  | '------.   ||                                                              
  | .----.  \  ||     SRSS  RS       ###   ###  ###                            
  | |___  \ |  ||      S   R  S      #  # #    #                               
  |  _  \ | |  ||      S   R  S      ###  ###  ###                             
  | (_) |_| |__||      S   R  S      #  #    #    #                            
   \____________/      S    RS       #  # ###  ###