Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.

Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume “content.” (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It’s now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what’s new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: Especially for those who don’t want to miss anything or have algorithms choosing what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the internet. Here’s a primer on what RSS can (still!) do for you, and how to get started with it, even in this late era of online existence.

  • @thru_dangers_untold
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    11 months ago

    All youtube channels have their own feeds, but they’re not obvious to find. The first part of the URL looks like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
    

    Go to the channel’s home page and search the page source for “channel_id=” (with a long string of numbers and letters after it, often starting with a “U”) then paste the ID after the equal sign. The channel id looks something like this: UCtwKon9qMt5YLVgQt1tvJKg

    • FauxPseudo
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      11 months ago

      You wouldn’t need that if YouTube actually sent notifications like it’s supposed to. So this will come in handy.

    • @Plopp
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      611 months ago

      Hang on, do you or anyone else know if it’s possible to add playlists to RSS in this way? There are channels that I overall don’t want to watch but that have a specific playlist I want to follow.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 months ago

      This might be useful for their community posts - is there a seperate feed for them or are they included in the videos feed?

      I never see the community posts anywhere except for the home page & on the creator’s page. Which makes it frustrating because I only stay in the subscriptions page - so I only get updates if they upload a video.

      • @thru_dangers_untold
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        11 months ago

        Yeah, this doesn’t include community posts. I haven’t tried finding one tho