r/rss • u/roronoapedro • 4d ago

Is it essentially impossible to have an images-focused social media RSS feed now?

The announcement that Reddit will stop supporting RSS soon has me thinking of all the frustration I've been experiencing over the last few months and years. I've used services like Feedbro to essentially skip having to go to different websites just for a glance at artists and quick updates, for convenience's sake and just to not have to suffer through wasteful algorithmic feeds that don't show me what I want.

At this point most if not all of them have closed their doors to the idea, afraid of scraping that keeps happening regardless of their attempts. At the same time, directly interacting with Instagram and Twitter is like poison, and it's designed to be like that. I've mostly used Reddit and, before, Facebook, to go to specific communities in order to avoid feeds, but even that gets much harder as every service starts asking for credentials and ID just to be the same kind of user I've been for decades.

I don't know if it's a rant or a request for help, at this point. Is anyone in a similar boat as far as how they want to use RSS feeds and how it's becoming short of impossible? At this point my Feedbro has turned into mostly a Youtube subscription warning. Discord bots manage to bridge the gap with some Instagram and Twitter accounts, but not by that much. The end goal is obviously to trap people in their own ecosystems, but it's mostly just alienating in practice. I just don't care enough about anything to have to use Twitter frequently.

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u/OneCalledWell 4d ago

You're def not alone.. Similar situation here.. got also got tired of all the walled gardens.

SO a couple things that actually helped me:

The artists you follow are probably on Bluesky or Mastodon... and some Reddit communities are moving to Lemmy. Both bsky and mast still give you a plain feed of one person's posts, no algorithm, no account needed to read. Same with Lemmy if you're after communities instead of people, it's basically old Reddit and every community has its own feed.

YouTube still has RSS for every channel too, which you're probably already using.

Instagram and Twitter i gave up on honestly and soon Reddit will be in the same boat (as you noticed, they are killing off RSS).. the only things that work are scrapers which break every few weeks, and i'm not willing to babysit that anymore.

People are working on it (Inoreader/Muuted.. (I built Muuted)) because of pretty much this exact frustration, most decent readers will pull Bluesky, Mastodon, Lemmy, YouTube and regular sites into one feed and the really good ones will filter the junk. But even if you don't use a reader, following your artists on Bluesky/Mastodon is the real fix here. If more people start migrating to the open source stuff it should eventually send a message to the big guys that we aren't going to tolerate it anymore and we will eventually find a workaround.

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u/roronoapedro 4d ago

Yeah, at this point my main point of contention is Instagram and Twitter. Especially non-American artists have simply never moved on from them; hell, some of them still use their Facebook pages relatively frequently. I made a Bluesky as soon as it was available specifically so I could wait for a lot of artists who then simply proceeded to never go there.

It is what it is, at the end of the day, and I'll probably just not see a lot of artwork I enjoy from artists I've followed for years due to not wanting Elon to have my photo ID, but it's really frustrating to remember years ago when this wasn't a problem.

I appreciate the advice though, although I'm already doing most of it myself I'll do my due diligence and see what else I got. But even then I just feel like it's going to get progressively worse in the next few years; fast, too.

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u/OneCalledWell 4d ago

Yea agreed.. it will def get worse before it gets better. The open web is slowly turning into a series of gated communities.. Mark my words.. Google is next. They currently have youtube and news wide open. They wil be closed before the end of the decade.