𝕱𝖊𝖑 •v•

RSS for Artists and the People Who Follow Them

RSS is the best thing for artists that you didn't know still existed. Tired of trying to figure out what new thing you have to do this week to get your posts seen? Tired of keeping up with 8 different websites to follow all the artists you like? Do you hate Musk/Zuckerberg, the general social media experience for artists, endless scrolling, or fractured communities? Use RSS! It's a super simple and comfortable way to experience social media.

What is RSS and why should I care?

RSS is a standardized format at a URL that computers can read to monitor updates to a website. When a post gets made, the RSS feed gets updated containing the post's information. An RSS reader is the app you use to view these RSS feeds and subscribe to them. It displays updates to the RSS feed similar to a normal social media dashboard.

There are many more specifics we could get into, but the technical details aren't really what matter here: the main point is that you can use an RSS reader to follow all your favorite people from almost any site and never miss an update, all while being able to view the content at your own pace.

Through simple steps outlined further down, you can follow twitter, instagram, deviant art, youtube, and tumblr accounts, subreddits, personal websites, newsletters, and more! The cool thing is, unlike your twitter or instagram feed, the RSS reader has powerful tools to display the posts exactly to your liking with filters, sorting, AND posts that won't disapear until you mark them as read, so you can kiss FOMO goodbye. Of course, this does mean I don't necessarily recommend you use RSS for your general meme accounts where an endless feed is somewhat ideal, it's much better suited for following creators or others you want to keep up to date on.

I use Inoreader as my RSS reader because it's free (though you can pay for more features), has a good mobile app as well as a browser version, and a good UI that is comfortable for post viewing.

Benefits as a viewer

Benefits as an artist

How to subscribe to social media feeds through RSS

Here's a quick run down of how subscribing to an RSS feed generally works:

  1. A website exists that has RSS
  2. You type website.com/rss/ into your RSS reader and it sees an active feed
  3. You hit subscribe
  4. Peace on earth is achieved

Of course, sometimes it's not that simple and a website's feed is at a different URL. There might be a little RSS button on the website you can copy the link from, or readers like Inoreader can be given the basic URL and it'll try to find if any RSS feed is attached to it.

In the past, most socials had RSS built in, but this has slowly been phased out in favor of notifications/algorithms. So unfortunately, it's not as simple as it used to be anymore. Fortunately, however, websites like rssbox or RSS-Bridge can automatically turn twitter and other social media profiles into an RSS feed.

Before we get to that, however, there is some great news: some sites, such as tumblr and DeviantArt, still have RSS built in to each profile!

Tumblr feeds are at: https://blogname.tumblr.com/rss (god bless tumblr)

DeviantArt feeds: https://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?type=deviation&q=by%3Adeviantname+sort%3Atime+meta%3Aall (as usual, DA likes to over complicate things)

Enter the user name of the person you want to follow in the URL where indicated, pop it into your RSS reader, and you're good to go.

Youtube channels can also be followed by pasting the channel URL into your reader, where it'll grab the feed for you to follow automatically.

Note about tumblr feed urls1

So what about twitter and other bastard sites? That's where our friends on github who make open source projects come in. As mentioned above, rssbox and RSS-Bridge are both great options. You can host them on your own server, if you're into that kind of thing, to ensure you never lose service and your feeds might get updated faster, but both have free to use websites that make it as easy as:

  1. Copy the profile URL of the person you want to follow
  2. Locate the corresponding social media section on the rssbox/rss-bridge webpage and paste the URL in
  3. Adjust any settings you want
  4. Copy the URL it gives you and subscribe to it in your RSS reader

Note about social media functionality in RSS readers2

Another feed source of note is newsletters. Again, many readers will do this automatically for a price, but I enjoy the website Kill the Newsletter that'll do this for free. You can type in what you want to call the newsletter feed, click generate, and then sign up for the newsletter with the email address it creates for you. You'll then copy the second URL on the page (the one that ends in .xml) and this is what you'll plug into your RSS reader. Done! This is helpful for cleaning out your inbox of emails that you do want to see, but aren't important, and would otherwise end up cluttering up your inbox and burying time sensitive items.

Most websites, RSS feed or not, can have an RSS feed created for them if you're okay with it being a bit hacky. So I highly recommend doing some googling if you're interested in something I haven't mentioned here. You can also sometimes find RSS feeds for a website (if they aren't up front about it) by Inspecting the page and looking in the html head element for a .xtml or rss link. I'm passionate about this, so feel free to send me an ask on my tumblr if you have questions! (but also try to figure it out for yourself first)

How to get your own RSS feed

If you're on any kind of social, someone can follow an RSS feed of your art using the steps outlined above. However, I highly recommend you start posting your work somewhere with RSS built in! You don't have to do any extra work as your RSS feed is automatically made/updated on websites like tumblr and deviant art that still support RSS. I believe cohost might also be adding RSS support soon as well. I recommend following your own RSS feed so you know what is getting sent out.

If you want a space to truly call your own you can easily make a tiny website or blog. There are a lot of options for this, but if you're looking for simplicity I recommend bearblog.dev! Just make an account and start posting and your RSS feed is automatically made at: https://yourblog.bearblog.dev/feed/

Wordpress and Neocities also have built in RSS feeds, and likely a lot of other platforms that advertise blogging.

Now you have an RSS feed! And no worries about engagement from followers - it's easy to click the post link in your reader to a post, comment/like it, and then hop back into your RSS reader. It's made for that, even. Remember to advertise your RSS feed; I hope they become the norm again, but until that happens you'll probably have to let people know it exists.

Closing Remarks

Listen, I'm realistic about this. I don't think I'm going to make this post and then RSS will return in full force to the internet like wolves being introduced back into Yellowstone. However, I spent years being dissatisfied with how I was forced to engage with artists on social media - the endless scrolling, feeling like "if I don't look at the next post I'll never see this piece of art again", the usual horrors of the internet we've fallen into - and if I can introduce a real solution to that for just one person I'll be happy.

I was born in the 90s and so can remember personal sites and forums, but never learned what RSS was and thought it was only something for power user programmers or stuffy business men. I have a feeling a lot of people have the same misconception, and it pains me to think of people out there that could benefit so much from this if only they knew of it properly. If you have ADHD, this is a game changer, I assure you.

I wish someone would've told me about this years ago. RSS is the answer to a lot of problems artists have. It's been there all along, it just hasn't been properly introduced to the wider community.

So I might not have much reach, but I feel so passionate about this; for the people this could help and the community we could create if we wiggled out from under what corporations have turned the internet into.

And oh, people have tried to fix this, sans RSS. I've watched many art websites come and go claiming to be the one to fix everything, but they usually fail because they divide the community and don't gain traction quickly enough. That, and non-artist support is extremely valuable and usually alienated in these attempts. RSS, on the other hand, is everywhere! Anybody can use it, anybody can follow it, and you aren't restricted to just one thing.

I say RSS is the solution because it's not just RSS. It's a tool that allows you to have the flexibility to make whatever solutions you need and be where ever you need to be on the internet.

RSS used to be everywhere, it used to be advertised - but of course, RSS feeds don't display ads, so it's only natural their head was on the chopping block. So my advice is such: pressure websites to add RSS back in! Make a tiny blog or website! Follow some feeds! Help reclaim the internet and regain control over the content you want to see. You don't have to be stuck in one spot, forced to use platforms you don't like, to see what you want and have your work be seen. Companies want us to consume more and more of what we don't want to see, to make us want to scroll endlessly into a stupor, and they'll do everything in their power to make us think we want it too.

So, I dunno, follow some RSS feeds. Could be fun.

  1. Sometimes, there appears to be small discrepancies between someone's tumbr.com/username url and username.tumblr.com url, and you must use the second for the rss feed link even though clicking on their profile name usually send you to the first link version. If you're having trouble, I recommend going to the user's archive on tumblr and then replacing the word "archive" with "rss" in the URL you're at. This way you'll know your formatting is right.↩

  2. Many RSS readers mention having twitter and other social support (usually with a paid subscription), but I've yet to see one that doesn't cap you at like, 20 accounts. This is a ridiculously small number. That said, Feedbro is a reader that is availble as a browser extention only and DOES offer real, free, endless social media to RSS feed conversion. Personally, I hate its UI as well as the way it automatically marks things as read, but it's up to you and what works best for you. I probably just missed a reader when I was looking around, so if this matters to you do your research on what reader you use.↩

#information #internet #rss #writing