I've edited some publicly available bridges to update and modify them and made a new Brave Search bridge (using AI, mainly Claude).

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 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 and 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.

There are also a number of ways you can subscribe to them through your web browser. With Firefox and the Inoreader plugin, you can click a button on the browser that looks for RSS feeds on the website you’re on and it subscribes or shows them. There are similar things for other browsers and RSS readers.

On an iPhone you can tap Share in your browser, tap Inoreader and it will look for feeds. You can probably do something similar with Android devices and other RSS readers.

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.

In some cases where the site doesn’t provide a feed you can use sites like fetchrss.com to make one. Inoreader can do this built-in on one of its paid subscriptions.

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 irrelevant clutter 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 money.

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 it into money. It also means they don’t like open formats that they don’t control.

Using RSS feeds

Readers

Inoreader is an RSS reader, which is what you use to subscribe to feeds and read them. It’s simple and free for beginners, with loads of extras on its paid options.

FreshRSS with FeedFlow is also very good for simple, clutter-free reading.

Blogs

WordPress is mainly a blogging site. All of its blogs have RSS feeds (unless disabled). You can also get feeds for tags and categories.

You can get feeds from pretty much every blogging platform.

Social

Bluesky provides RSS feeds for each user account (although links appear as non-clickable text).

Mastodon also provides feeds for users, plus hashtags and search terms.

Bookmarking

Raindrop is a bookmarking app where you can add bookmarks to a category and make the category public. That creates an RSS feed so other people can follow it or you can plug it into other apps.

Linkwarden is also good, and also has feeds for categories.

Other stuff

You can also get RSS feeds for YouTube accounts and pretty much every podcast.

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