Avoiding algorithms with RSS

I’m super late to the RSS scene and I know that many companies would like to see it go away in this era of algorithmically curated content. I would really like to take back some of that control and have the ability to decide which news/articles/videos I see, which has started my journey into RSS.

At the moment I primarily use it as a way to get updates from platforms that usually require an account to subscribe to creators and constantly recommend content that I don’t actually care about. Below I briefly describe some of the ways to get RSS feeds from popular video services.

YouTube

For now, youtube exposes feeds for individual channels that you can subscribe to without needing an account (I don’t expect this to stay around for long). The URL format is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$CHANNEL-ID, where $CHANNEL-ID is the unique identifier found in the URL of the main page of the channel (so the Level1Techs youtube RSS URL would be Level1Techs).

I’m pretty sure this is how NewPipe gets its subscription feed.

Twitch

https://github.com/lzeke0/TwitchRSS
Someone made this cool webapp which can be self hosted to have twitch livestreams and VODs exposed in an RSS feed, with a publicly accessible version at https://twitchrss.appspot.com/vod/twitch. At the time of writing this is actually broken due to some API changes that twitch is making, but a fix is already in progress.

There are several RSS readers which integrate well with mpv (such as RSS Guard and gfeeds) which makes video streaming a really nice experience.

Other than that I just subscribe to a couple feeds that I find interesting (a short list can be found in the first reply below). I’d love to hear about what feeds you subscribe to. Before posting I found an old thread where @dark0dave posted an opml file with some good recommendations.

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  • LINux on MOBile - Weekly updates on current status of linux on mobile devices, often related (but not limited) to devices like the pinephone and librem 5.
  • Console - Weekly posts that highlight various open source projects. Often has interviews with project contributors.
  • LibriVox’s latest releases - Free audiobook versions of public domain books read by volunteers. This feed is just the lastest things added to the platform.
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