WTF is an RSS feed?

In a nutshell

If you haven’t come across RSS feeds before, think of them as an update that goes from one place to another. Usually, that’s websites to an RSS reader but also from one app to another. An RSS reader is an app that you use to subscribe to feeds and read them.

In a bigger nutshell

(like a coconut or a giant pistachio)

In the feed you (usually) get the title of the item, the author and/or source, the date, a description or summary and a link. Like this:

A News Headline
by S. Omeone at News Website
3/12/25
Some news, news, news
https://www.news.com/news

Sometimes you get an image or other bits of info. RSS feeds are a generic format, so it doesn’t belong to a single person or company, like how email doesn’t belong to Google or Microsoft. That means that it’s used by lots of different apps that can all connect to each other, unlike Twitter or Instagram where you can only follow accounts on the same platform.

They’re generally found on blogs and news websites as they’re well suited to sequences of bite-sized information in chronological order. They’re also used for podcasts, video sites and forums, and more niche or innovative uses. Basically, it’s anything where you might want an update without having to go back to the site to find out if it’s changed.

How do I subscribe to them?

Usually, you get the feed's address, which looks like the address of a web page. Something like:

feeds.newswebsite.com/rss
rss.newswebsite.com/news

You get that by looking for a link that says RSS. If the site is a bit old school it might have a little icon that looks like an orange radar. You copy that address into your RSS reader et voila.

In most RSS readers you can paste the address of the website where you add a feed without having to find the address of the feed itself. By way of example, rss.com has got an RSS feed (unsurprisingly). Its address is:

https://rss.com/blog/feed/

To subscribe to it, open your RSS reader, click the button to add a new feed and paste that address in. You will see a list of recent posts, with new posts as they are published.

With many browsers and readers you can get a plugin where you click a button on the browser that looks for RSS feeds in the website you’re on and it subscribes or shows them.

On mobile you can tap share in your browser, tap the share icon for your reader app and it will look for feeds.

In a lot of RSS readers you can also search for feeds inside the reader.

Can I get an RSS feed for anything?

No. The website has to provide one. They’re not as common as they used to be but a lot of sites still provide them.

What are the benefits to using them?

The benefits come from them being widespread, simple, and open. You get your updates in one place. Instead of getting your updates on multiple sites or apps, your feeds from all over the place all go into your RSS reader. You only get the stuff you want, without the stuff you don’t. You get the updates in chronological order, without ‘suggested for you’, ‘you might like’ or just irrelevant crap along with it.

You can get RSS feeds from lots of places and use lots of different things to read them. As it’s a generic format, all RSS feeds from anywhere are basically the same thing, and they work with all RSS readers. This is unlike self-contained silos (like Twitter and Instagram) that are not compatible with anything else.

Why haven’t I heard of this before?

As with a lot of things, the answer is £$£$£$ Tech companies like to draw people into silos where their services don’t work with anyone else’s. It means they can monopolise your attention, gather data, and turn them into money. It also means they don’t like open formats that they don’t control.

Using RSS feeds

You can get and use feeds with lots of different things. I’ll highlight a few of the main uses.

Readers

RSS readers are are what you use to subscribe to feeds and read them. There are a huge range of them. They're usually free. It's easy to switch between them so just go with what seems good and you can switch later if you want to.

Blogs

You can get feeds from pretty much every blogging platform so you can read all your favourite blogs in one place.

Social

Bluesky and Mastodon provide feeds for each user account, althoughn Bluesky links appear as non-clickable text. Mastodon also provides feeds for hash tags.

Podcasts

Podcasting basically runs on RSS. It's how podcast apps know there are new episodes. Most podcasts have a feed that you can subcribe to in your reader.

Bookmarking

A lot bookmarking services (like Raindrop or Linkwarden) let you add bookmarks to a category and make the category public, with an RSS feed for the category so other people can follow it or you can plug it into other apps.

Other stuff

You can also get RSS feeds for YouTube accounts, Reddit and lots of other stuff.

Hopefully that’s all you need to get started. Happy RSSing.