Gather 'round, kids, and let me tell you how the Internet used to be, before Facebook. If you wanted to post your everyday musings and have friends and family comment on it, you ran a blog ("web log"). You put it on your own website or, eventually, on a hosted one. You could read it directly on the site, as you may be doing right now, or you could subscribe to the (news)feed.

"Feed" is terrible, terrible branding. But that's because nobody's making money off it.

They're often called "RSS feeds." Nowadays it's just as often ATOM format but it generally doesn't matter, a "feed reader" will read both. What's a feed reader? It's basically your Facebook timeline, except instead of being in weird order, and only showing a tiny fraction of the businesses' posts, it's every. single. post. that the Pages you subscribe to post. At least, all the public ones.

It's not just Facebook, though.

Facebook is just the one people most often go "I have to be there" about. And sometimes they're right, but more often what they're really saying "I can't check a dozen or more different sites every morning just to see which ones have changed." That's what feeds are about. They're just a machine-readable form of "here's what's new" for a site. Your computer, or a server you subscribe to, grabs each of those feeds on a daily, hourly, or even minute...ly(?) basis, and drops them into a timeline.

That's what you check. You get everything that's new, and only what's new, from everywhere.

You can generally view every article in straight-up chronological order, just like old-school Facebook, or you can group feeds in categories, or you can read each category individually. I go with categories, which gives me a nice variety without whiplashing between Super Cute Kawaii and articles on the latest war crimes.

How do I get a feed reader?

You have to make one decision: Do you want to read the feeds from anywhere, or just at home? If the former, you probably want to subscribe to a service. After that? Just try one! It doesn't really matter as long as it supports OPML import/export. Yeah, terrible branding again.

Because, again, feeds are universal and not controlled by a single company making money off them, there is no catchy little name for that, but it's just a super-standardized file that holds your list of feeds and the categories they're in. You can download your OPML file and go somewhere else any time, and your feeds will go with you.

If you don't want to mess with a third-party service, there are plenty of local-only feed readers. And there are some that can do both: I run Tiny Tiny RSS on my desktop computer, but I reach it with a web browser and I can get to it from my phone or laptop as long as I'm on the house wifi.

What can I follow with it?

Anything!

There's a standard syndication feed symbol, but hardly anyone shows it off anymore. That doesn't matter to your feed reader, because there's usually markup in the site's HTML that your feed reader can look at to find the feed info. All you need to do is put the website address in to the "add subscription" box, and the computers will talk to each other from there.

Once in awhile you encounter a WordPress site whose template maker is an idiot unfamiliar with syndication and who took it out of the standard headers. Your feed reader will probably check anyway, but in case it doesn't, you can try just adding /feed onto the end of the address if your reader doesn't find a feed for a site.

Some sites, like newspapers, have a separate feed for every section, and if you poke around you might hit the jackpot. Or you might just try subscribing to each section page instead of just the home page.

Okay, but that doesn't work on Facebook!

Facebook used to have RSS feeds. But like many businesses, once they got to critical mass, the walls went up and the feeds came down. Same with Twitter (or "X" if you insist), and same with other Meta properties like Instagram.

There are always people who find ways to undermine the walls, and for that I use RSS Bridge. If you duckduck "facebook rss" or "instagram rss" you can find a few other services that build third-party RSS feeds from publicly-available Facebook Pages (so, no personal FB accounts, and no closed groups). Maybe you can find "twitter rss" too but honestly, there is nothing left on Twitter but Nazis and people who don't mind sharing space with Nazis (so: more Nazis). Check Tumblr, the fediverse, or Bluesky and you can probably find the account you wanted to follow there - and those networks still have feeds built in so you can just subscribe directly.

If it's at all sequential and at all popular, someone has probably written a conversion for it. You can find services that have created feeds for syndicated comics - most webcomic software has it built in, but again GoComics has put up walls. (They say it's about advertising but you can put ads in feeds. It's about doing tracking with the advertising.)

Get started

You can build your feed collection organically - every time you visit a website directly, try subscribing to it in your reader. But it's a little easier to get in the habit of checking the reader if there's a bunch of stuff there to begin with. You can copy the texts here into a file named anything dot opml, and import that into your feed reader. You can import more then one, and unsubscribe from anything that doesn't click for you.

Comics sampler

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml version="1.0">
  <head>
    <dateCreated>Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:37:43 +0000</dateCreated>
    <title>Comics Sampler</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <outline text="Feeds" ttrssSortOrder="0">
      <outline text="comics" ttrssSortOrder="0">
        <outline type="rss" text="birdandmoon.com" xmlUrl="http://birdandmoon.tumblr.com/rss" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://birdandmoon.tumblr.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="False Knees" xmlUrl="https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/false-knees/rss?title_no=79544" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/false-knees/list?title_no=79544"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="Freefall" xmlUrl="https://crosstimecafe.com/Webcomics/Feeds/Freefall.xml" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="http://freefall.purrsia.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="Hi, I'm Liz" xmlUrl="http://lizclimo.tumblr.com/rss" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://lizclimo.tumblr.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="Kevin and Kell" xmlUrl="https://osbourne.org/rss/kk.xml" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="http://kevinandkell.com"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="Order of the Stick" xmlUrl="https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.rss" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="-1" htmlUrl="http://www.giantitp.com/Comics.html"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="Texts From Superheroes" xmlUrl="https://textsfromsuperheroes.com/rss" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://textsfromsuperheroes.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="they can talk" xmlUrl="https://theycantalk.com/rss" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://theycantalk.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="What If?" xmlUrl="https://what-if.xkcd.com/feed.atom" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://what-if.xkcd.com"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="xkcd.com" xmlUrl="https://xkcd.com/atom.xml" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://xkcd.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="THIS MODERN WORLD" xmlUrl="https://thismodernworld.com/feed" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://thismodernworld.com"/>
      </outline>
    </outline>
  </body>
</opml>

Recipe Sampler

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml version="1.0">
  <head>
    <dateCreated>Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:37:43 +0000</dateCreated>
    <title>Recipe Sampler</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <outline text="Feeds" ttrssSortOrder="0">
      <outline text="food" ttrssSortOrder="0">
        <outline type="rss" text="Budget Bytes" xmlUrl="https://www.budgetbytes.com/feed/" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://www.budgetbytes.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="Mel's Kitchen Cafe" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/melskitchencafe/NvNP" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://www.melskitchencafe.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="Rose Water &amp; Orange Blossoms" xmlUrl="https://www.maureenabood.com/feed/" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://www.maureenabood.com/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="smitten kitchen" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/smittenkitchen" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://smittenkitchen.com"/>
      </outline>
    </outline>
  </body>
</opml>

News Sampler

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml version="1.0">
  <head>
    <dateCreated>Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:37:43 +0000</dateCreated>
    <title>News Sampler</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <outline text="Feeds" ttrssSortOrder="0">
      <outline text="news" ttrssSortOrder="0">
        <outline type="rss" text="Articles and Investigations - ProPublica" xmlUrl="http://feeds.propublica.org/propublica/main" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://www.propublica.org/feeds/main"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="The 19th" xmlUrl="https://19thnews.org/feed/" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://19thnews.org/"/>
        <outline type="rss" text="American Medical Association (AMA)" xmlUrl="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCE83i5yn_YQ1HnFO027BnnQ" ttrssSortOrder="0" ttrssPurgeInterval="0" ttrssUpdateInterval="0" htmlUrl="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE83i5yn_YQ1HnFO027BnnQ"/>
      </outline>
    </outline>
  </body>
</opml>

Take back your Internet reading!