updated May 24, 2026
Contents
Which Social Media Sites Have RSS?
Bluesky Workarounds
Many feedreaders allow "full content" or "full text" views, which forces the image attached to a Bluesky message to display. In Inoreader on desktop, click the coffee-cup icon or press W to load full content. In their mobile app, open the skeet and pull down as though refreshing the page in a web browser. This isn't the default because it's extra data, more difficult and costly to process, and most things you'd use an RSS reader for don't require it. This obviously isn't ideal and I would recommend, instead:
OpenRSS will act as go-between and create a more fully-featured RSS feed for Bluesky profiles. The format is https://openrss.org/bsky.app/profile/[username].bsky.social (or whatever custom domain they're using). This also works for shares, quote posts, adult content, & private Bluesky accounts. It does not (currently?) load videos, and multiple images attached to the same post all show up as copies of the first image.
2026 update: I'm leaving the above intact, but I've mostly moved away from trying to follow Bluesky through OpenRSS. They seem to have gotten more aggressive about IP blocking when they feel a user is making too many requests and I'm tired of emailing to ask nicely for them to let me back in. I think they're more lenient to people who make donations.
RSS Feed Tutorials For Beginners
RSS Feeds - Open RSS - a short primer on RSS feed whats, whys, & hows.
Jey Pawlik's Mini Guide to RSS - guide in comic form. As a note, Feedly is anti-labor protest & tries to lock in users with proprietary export formats.
RSS & You - recording of a panel by Jey Pawlik as part of Nib & Ink Fest, intended for webcomic artists & readers.
Kitty Unpretty's How to RSS 2023 - Setup guide for gathering feeds into Inoreader.
doqmeat's RSS guide - information on RSS feeds from the perspective of an indie webmaster.
You Should Be Using RSS Feeds - includes tips on finding, using, & making feeds.
Collecting & Reading RSS Feeds
OpenRSS's list of feed readers - a table maintained by OpenRSS, comparing features such as platform & browser extension availability, filtering, search functions, and full-text mode. Anything marked with "Yes" in the import/export column supports quick setup of new accounts while seamlessly maintaining your list of subscriptions in an OPML file, so the cost of testing new feedreaders is low.
Feedbro - Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge, Brave and Firefox browser addon for RSS feed collecting & reading. Simple one-click function to uncover RSS on sites you visit.
Fraidyc.at - Firefox & Chrome browser addon. Design intent is specifically tuned for mimicking social media follows in a digestible way where other services are structured more like an email inbox. Fraidyc.at does not have any kind of image-viewing functionality, as far as I can tell; it shows recent posts as a list of links to be opened in another tab. It does support Twitter, which most other readers have trouble with, but it cannot penetrate locked or 18+ accounts.
Kitty Unpretty's "archive binge" recommendations - services which take podcasts and webcomics and package a personal feed which is spaced out over time, such as one page per day or one episode per week.
OpenRSS - a service which creates RSS feeds for websites which don't have them, including Telegram channels and Bluesky accounts.
RSS.app - a paid service which generates RSS feeds for arbitrary websites. I'm not willing to shell out 10 bucks a month for 15 feeds (the basic plan) but it's also one of the few services I've found that handles Twitter and Instagram smoothly.
Kill the Newsletter - a service which provides you with a dummy e-mail address and converts newsletters sent to that address to something a feedreader can use.
Nitter - an alternate Twitter frontend. Nitter instances generate bare-bones RSS feeds at [Nitter instance URL]/[USERNAME]/rss, with no images. Nitter is not actively maintained because of X's hostility to third-party workarounds and I wouldn't count on it being available in the long term.
RSS Feed Tools (For Sickos)
Sorry but all this stuff has a bad case of open source documentation. Provided at your own risk with no liability to me.
RSSHub - A bridge service for generating RSS feeds for websites that don't have any. Several public instances, and you can also host your own if you're savvy. I'm not clear on how well this actually works because a lot of the examples in their documentation seem to be marked "test failed" as of writing. It definitely seems like an option for Bluesky, Threads, and Cara, among others.
FiveFilters Feed Creator - A service which creates custom RSS feeds from arbitary websites. Give it an HTML class or ID and it will pull any links on that page inside that type of element. Might be possible to follow, for example, a Neocities sitemap this way; I will need to test.
RSS-Bridge - a service which will generate RSS feeds for websites that don't natively have them. The Twitter bridge doesn't work, I haven't tested many others. I admire that one of the feeds provided is for tracking Bad Dragon sales & clearance offers.
Adding RSS to Your Website
The Neocities RSS Guide - provides boilerplate and instructions for hand-coding an RSS feed.
doqmeat's RSS guide - another tutorial for both gathering RSS feeds through Feedbro and writing your own for a small website.
How to build your own RSS feed. - Another straightforward tutorial.
Full guide to RSS - Overview & tutorial including a good breakdown of the individual code elements that go into a feed.
W3C Feed Validation Service - Checks the syntax of an RSS feed from a URL or direct text input and makes suggestions for compliance with best practices.
RuSShdown - by Chaia Eran & Viv Lim. An in-browser RSS feed generation tool which supports Markdown and HTML formatting in the description field.
RSS Feed Builder - in-browser Javascript tool for streamlining RSS feed entries, by yours truly.
ZoneRSS - a Zonelets-compatable RSS blogging tool by Adam Le Doux. Allows you to compose posts in-browser and download an updated RSS feed plus templated HTML. This is also usable for standalone RSS-posting or for custom non-Zonelets templates.
"a very hacky script to generate an xml item for your rss feed" by sol - a simple python script for converting plaintext title/path/description to a formatted entry.
Manual RSS Feed for Nova - an extension for the Nova code editor for Mac which streamlines adding items to a manual RSS feed; written by Fionna