5 things you didn't know you could add to your RSS feed

RSS is older than most of the stuff we use on the Internet on a daily basis. It's older than Facebook, it's older than this very website, and it's just as old as Google. And it remains very widely used because it's tremendously useful.

As it turns out, RSS isn't just good for curating a feed of articles or social media posts. There's a ton of stuff you can use with RSS.

1. Tracking GitHub projects and release updates

For developers and technology enthusiasts alike, staying updated on software dependencies or interesting open-source projects often involves drowning in email notifications or obsessively checking repository pages. That can quickly get extremely time-consuming. However, GitHub quietly supports the RSS standard, letting you monitor project activity with granular precision without ever visiting the site. While the platform encourages users to use the internal "Watch" feature, this often results in a cluttered notification inbox filled with minor discussions that bury important updates. With RSS, though, you can filter this noise and receive updates in a passive, organized timeline alongside your news and other reading materials.

The most practical application of this is perhaps tracking software releases. Most repositories automatically generate an Atom feed for their releases, which can be accessed by appending the correct path to the repository URL. The standard format follows the pattern of the website's address followed by the specific user and repository name, ending with a releases.atom suffix. This provides a clean feed of only official version publications, complete with patch notes and changelogs. This is particularly valuable for tracking libraries or tools where you only care about stable updates rather than the daily development grind.

2. Following any subreddit or Reddit search

Reddit is one of the internet's most active sources of information, but its UI encourages doomscrolling and indulging in the occasional fight. For those who wish to extract information from Reddit without engaging with its gamified elements or chaotic comment sections, the platform offers robust, albeit poorly advertised, RSS support. This allows users to turn high-volume subreddits into a linear news ticker, ensuring that no headline is missed while bypassing the need to open the app or website. This method effectively decouples the content from the community interaction, which is ideal for power users who view Reddit strictly as an information aggregator .

Every public subreddit has a native feed that can be accessed by simply adding a .rss extension to the end of the URL. For example, navigating to a subreddit's "new" tab and appending this suffix creates a real-time stream of every incoming submission. This is exceptionally useful for moderators or news junkies who need to see information the second it is posted, rather than waiting for it to be upvoted enough to appear on a "Hot" or "Best" page. This functionality even extends to search queries. By performing a search on Reddit and appending 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 be aware of is that many modern RSS applications and aggregators struggle to validate Reddit feeds due to the platform's strict rate limiting and bot protection measures. Furthermore, these apps rarely auto-discover the feeds, meaning you cannot simply type in the name of the subreddit. You must manually formulate the URL, including the secure protocol and the correct extension. But if you can get it working, it's pretty cool.

3. Subscribing to YouTube creators without using the algorithm

YouTube 's interface is engineered to keep you glued, prioritizing algorithmic recommendations over the specific content you've subscribed to. The "Subscription" tab exists, but it is often cluttered with "Shorts" or buried under a UI that encourages distraction. Turns out, you can actually return to a classic, chronological consumption model, and for this, YouTube channels actually generate RSS feeds. You can't really go back to the old days, but this is probably the closest thing.

Using these feeds restores the relationship between the viewer and the creator to a simple notification system: when a video is uploaded, it appears in your reader. That's it. There is no algorithm sorting the order, no thumbnail A/B testing to distract you, and no sidebar tempting you to click away. Pretty cool, right?

The structure for these feeds is not really intuitive and requires a specific URL format that points to the platform's feed directory. The critical component of this URL is the Channel ID. Recently, YouTube has moved toward using user-friendly handles in browser bars, which mask the underlying unique identifier required for RSS. To subscribe via RSS, you cannot use the creator's vanity name. Instead, you must locate the channel's unique ID string—usually beginning with "UC"—which can often be found in the page source code or via the "About" sections on the channel page. Once this ID is appended to the correct feed URL structure, the result is an XML file containing video metadata.

Most modern RSS readers will not find this feed if you simply paste the link to the YouTube channel's homepage because the site does not advertise the RSS autodiscovery tags in a way that all readers can parse. Consequently, you must perform the manual work of extracting the ID and building the link. If you miss the old YouTube, though, this is probably worth the mess.

4. Keeping up with Mastodon and other federated social posts

The rise of the fediverse and platforms like Mastodon has reintroduced the concept of the open social web, and fittingly, these platforms have excellent, native interoperability with RSS. Most closed social networks wall off data to prevent third-party scraping, but Mastodon instances are built on open protocols that treat content accessibility as a feature. This means that almost every public profile on a Mastodon instance can be turned into an RSS feed.

Accessing these feeds is generally straightforward. For most instances running standard Mastodon software, appending .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 as well. If you navigate to a tag's timeline and apply the same suffix, you can create a news feed centered around a specific topic, conference, or event.

Because different instances may run different forks of the software or have strict privacy settings enabled, the auto-discovery features in RSS readers often fail. Simply pasting a user's profile link might not work if the instance administrator has disabled certain public endpoints or if the reader software doesn't know how to query that specific server. So again, as with most of the other items in this list, you have to put the link together manually.

5. Monitoring websites that don't "officially" support RSS

In the modern web landscape, the orange RSS icon has largely disappeared from headers and footers. Many designers and developers of contemporary websites assume that users rely solely on social media for updates, leading them to hide or remove visible links to RSS feeds. However, this does not always mean the technology is absent. A vast number of websites are built on CMSes like WordPress, Ghost, or Drupal, which generate RSS feeds automatically by default. Even if a site claims not to support RSS, the feed might still exist, but just be hidden away.

The first step in monitoring these "feedless" sites is guessing the common URL structures. Appending simple suffixes such as /feed, /rss, or .xml to the main domain or a specific category page will frequently reveal a valid XML file. For example, a corporate blog that appears to be a static page might actually be a WordPress installation where the feed lives at 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 feed 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 scraping the visual HTML structure of a webpage—looking for repeated patterns like headlines and timestamps—and converting that data into a standardized RSS format. Your mileage may vary with this approach, but it might just work for your setup.

RSS is tremendously useful in this day and age if you know how to use it. And with these tips, you're almost certainly going to take full advantage from it.