RSS Still Wins in 2025

Its January 2025 and the internet as we knew it in 2020 is again being upended. Elmo and Muskrat are both kneeling down and working to ensure that we, as society, are not able to communicate and connect.

Luckily for us, this is a problem that was solved at the opening stages of Web 2.0, blogs and RSS.

FreshRSS is my tool of choice

There are a lot of different ways that you can interact with the world and view RSS feeds. The way I do it is a self-hosted FreshRSS instance. I have been using it for over 6y now, and really dug into it in the middle of 2020.

However, that isn't the only tool out there. Thunderbird has RSS feed subscriptions built in, you can use Vivaldi, or Tiny Tiny RSS.

Any of these options will do the job, and get you reading.

Finding Feeds

Now, this is the harder part. Finding feeds to follow. Corporate social media doesn't want you to consume off site. They can't serve ads to you that way. However, if you want to follow someone in the fediverse, or at least Mastodon, then its relatively easy.

For example, if there is a Mastodon profile that you want to follow with your new RSS reader, you can add .rss to the end of the profile URL. For my public mastodon it would look like this https://bluenoser.me/@jeff.rss.

Sharing Feeds.

Another way to find feeds is to find people sharing their OPML lists. OPML is a great tool for sharing lists of anything in a structured way.

If you have nothing to follow, here are some OPML files to get you started.

These are sub-categorized which FreshRSS breaks when using the Dynamic OPML function, however it will create categories if you import them.

For Example, I have the news.opml into three categories, Nova Scotia, Canada and International.

Update

I have added a human readable version of these lists, you can find them here

Your feeds and suggestions

If you already have a nicely curated RSS feed list, I would love to take a look at it. Comment below or @ me on the fediverse, my links are here - links.

:wq