#or set up an RSS feed

[protaetia]

🐞

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: May 6

"Everybody Loves Me" by OneRepublic

[mycorrhizastar]

tumblr is an incredibly stupid website because it will even flag its own radar posts as mature... even when said posts are not mature.

dog shit platform, just like all other social media.

anyways be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds on my website.

[1o1percentmilk]

enshittification real

[foxgirltail]

Honestly if Tumblr kicks the bucket I'm going to do my damnedest to just become extremely offline I think

I'll probably miss the little window I have into my friends/mutuals lives here but I am not making half a dozen new socials scattered across the interwebs just to keep up with everyone and none of the "Tumblr alternatives" that I'm familiar with seem at all appealing to me

Mewties can ask for my disc hord though and someday I'm going to post a neocities and that's about it

Also I'll still be streaming so you can catch me there

[ackee]

sometimes i wish i had enough money to do a mailing list (thru email ofc). no longer on social media you will just get my art in your mailbox fr

[ping1n]

I love it when I swipe down on an image on mobile trying to dismiss it and instead it shows me another image

And maybe it's a nice image. So when I reflexively back the fuck out of this unexpected behaviour I try to scroll down and find it.

and it's not there

where did you find this image tumblr

[petrichorvoices]

RSS feeds our love.

[zorquil]

Alright, time to revisit RSS once more! :D If someone is moving to a new blogging site or making your own site, I'm ready!

[nochi-quinn]

another thing I've been doing is actually updating my danged website for a change. a bunch of my art has gone up there recently, mostly pixel art bc that's what I have the biggest backlog of.

[friendshapedplant]

Just for funsies I enabled RSS for this blog and my art blog @atticus--atlas if anyone uses RSS Feed and wants to see when I post an art or Random Bullshit that way dfbfshrth

[smellslikebot]

how to keep following people when a major social platform implodes

(...and you don't want to join 20 new websites)

First, get an RSS reader*-- here are some free options:

Desktop: Feedbro (browser extension), Fraidycat** (browser extension/web), Thunderbird, Dreamwidth (web)

Android: Feeder

iOS/Mac: NetNewsWire

You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.

Some feed URLs for social media/other sites:

Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)

Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public

Mastodon: Use instance.url/@­username.rss

Deviantart: Info here

Spacehey: Info here

Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="

Reddit: Info here

Lemmy: At the top of a community's main page, there's a small RSS link next to where you sort posts/comments.

Some additions thanks to @innumerablewounds:

Dreamwidth: https://username.dreamwidth.org/rss (users can opt out of this).

Ao3: Tags have an "RSS Feed" button.

Bluesky: Add /rss to the end of a URL.

Neocities: https://neocities.org/site/username.rss

Sites that won't work all that great:

Twitter: Feedbro and Fraidycat** may be able to use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) Public Nitter instances are dead/dying, and Twitter is now very hostile to pretty much anything that makes it easy to generate an RSS feed. For popular accounts, try this workaround using Google News...?

Instagram: Feedbro may be able to use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Check Feedbro's "scan interval" setting-- you could be rate limited or temporarily IP banned from Instagram if it makes requests too often!

Facebook: Feedbro may be able to use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs, but see the warnings for Instagram.

Threads: Come on.

Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).

*You can set up your subscriptions in one reader and import them into another by exporting an OPML file. **Fraidycat's intended use is following a lot of people across different sites, so it's well-suited for this post and I'd recommend keeping an eye on it-- but I didn't recommend it initially because I had some issues with it, and it hasn't been updated in a while. The last time I used it, it didn't have a setting to change how often it makes requests to websites, causing me to get IP banned from Twitter and Instagram...

[1o1percentmilk]

hmmm yeah i should think of somewhere to put myself just in case tumblr blows up

[mrnnki]

finally tried to replace the tumblr embed on the neocities because I found a widget that doesn't display the images at full size so people can actually see them and then it decided to be a pain when I was trying to make it fit on mobile

[unpretty]

How To RSS: 2023 Edition

An updated version of the guide I keep rewriting even though no one asked.

What is RSS?

Really Simple Syndication. Websites generate feeds, you plug the feeds into your feed reader of choice, you get updates as they happen instead of manually checking bookmarks. If you are using an actual podcasting app instead of spotify, you're already using RSS, because that's how podcasts work. In the same way that you can follow someone's blog and have everything they post appear on your dash instead of manually checking their blogs, RSS lets you build a dash for the entire rest of the internet. Assuming they have an RSS feed. You'd be surprised how many of them do and will learn to be annoyed at any that don't.

Picking an RSS Reader

For the purposes of this post I'm assuming you'll be using inoreader.com, because it's what I use and it has a free option and I'm lazy. Inoreader also has Android and iOS apps, so if you interact with the internet entirely through your phone you can still do all this. The only limitations of a free Inoreader account is that there are ads, and you're limited to 150 feeds. That's still a lot of feeds imho. There are a ton of alternatives and you can look into them if you want but I'm not worrying about that here.

It is unbelievably easy to change your mind later and switch to a different RSS reader without losing anything. Do not get hung up with decision paralysis trying to pick The Perfect App like it's a commitment. You can port everything you do in Inoreader to any other app or website in minutes. It's fine.

Subscribing to the Internet

If I weren't lazy I'd go make a new Inoreader account to walk you through that process but here we are, with me not doing that. Once you make an account, it's probably going to suggest some things for you to follow. You can do that if you want, but the real things you care about are the search bar at the top left and the 'add new' button at the bottom of where all your feeds will go.

For most websites, Inoreader can actually automatically detect any RSS feeds, so you don't have to go hunting them down. I'm going to use my own website for this because fuck you that's why.

If you're using the Android or iOS apps, search is hidden under the 'discover' menu item. When you click on the feed, you'll be subscribed! You can also click the 'add new' button, which will give you a bunch of options, but the one you want is 'Feed'.

A lot of the options listed there are locked behind a pro account, I don't know if they even show up if you're on free and I'm not checking. Once you click 'feed' it just takes you to another search bar, so you honestly might as well just use the search bar up top tbqh. 'Add new' is more useful for creating folders to organize all your stuff.

Mastodon, Cohost, and Tumblr accounts all generate RSS feeds automatically, just enter the URL of whoever you want to follow and the feed will get detected. But on Tumblr specifically, username.tumblr.com/rss will give you a feed of everything, while username.tumblr.com/tagged/fanfic/rss (for instance) will get you a feed of nothing but posts tagged 'fanfic'. This is actually a very useful way of following blogs that post way too goddamn much about things you don't care about.

If Inoreader is having trouble detecting a feed, try searching the website for an icon that looks like this:

That's usually where the feed is hiding. Just copy the URL and paste it into Inoreader to subscribe.

Okay But Now What

NOW YOU WAIT

Or don't, there's probably already recent articles your reader has now been populated with.

I don't remember what the default settings are, mine are currently set to only ever show me unread posts in 'magazine view' which is like a list with a little preview I can scroll through, sorted by oldest first. Clicking on an article opens it up in a reader view.

Personally I'm partial to scrolling through and only opening up things that look interesting to me. If I realize it's actually too long for me to read right that minute, I'll hit the 'read later button' to save it. Once I've scrolled through the whole list, I hit the 'mark all as read' button. But that's just how I do things, I'm an inbox zero kinda bitch.

If you really want to make it feel like Tumblr, you'll have to set it to expanded view and newest first.

In this mode scrolling past articles will mark them as read, but if you set it to still show you articles you've already read that probably doesn't matter as much.

By default most RSS feeds will contain previews of articles rather than the full thing in order to prevent scraping, but here's a fun thing: Inoreader has a 'full article' button that will automatically pull through the article text, and which bypasses a surprising number of paywalls.

A major use case for my RSS reader is webcomics. While a lot of them don't actually display the full image inline, and the full article button doesn't really work with these, it's still nice to get the update notification and opening a new tab to read a comic is not that big a deal imho. Keeping up with webcomics this way is so much easier I can't imagine going back to bookmarks.

There are certain YouTube channels I subscribe to via RSS because I don't want to miss any episodes. You can subscribe to podcasts in Inoreader if you want to. Substack has RSS options for every newsletter that's hosted there. Most news websites have had RSS since forever and every Twitter account you ever followed for news was probably actually just reposting from their RSS reader.

Import and Export

Once you have one RSS reader set up, it becomes super easy to try out every RSS reader you can possibly think of because they all use .OPML files. Except maybe Feedly? Seems like they have a special import option for Feedly. Just another reason to not use Feedly, The RSS Reader For Bootlickers. Anyway Inoreader keeps all that under preferences, in Import, Export, Backup.

The full archive is nice to have, but the OPML file is what you want for quick and easy trying out of different readers. Export the file, import it in whatever alternate reader you want to try, and you will automatically be subscribed to all your feeds. It takes, like. Five minutes. I try out new RSS readers all the time to see if I'll like them. Once you switch to RSS you will marvel that you ever used the internet any other way, and also that everyone else has been putting up with websites and apps that use stupid bullshit to keep them from leaving.

[ao3commentoftheday]

I've never orphaned a fic, but I'm glad AO3 has the option to do that. When I was in my late teens, I deleted all of my work from FFN because I thought I was done writing fanfic and for some reason got the idea into my head that it was dangerous to just leave them up, in case future employers or whoever found them. Even though I was writing very tame, mostly K+ and T rated stuff based on relatively uncontroversial original works. *facepalm*

Anyway, if I'd had the option to orphan my fics back then, I think I probably would have done that instead of deleting them. I wish it had been an option. I don't intend on ever orphaning what I'm writing now, but it makes me happy to know that if I ever did want to no longer be associated with it, I'd have the option to do that without taking it offline completely.

It's things like the orphan feature that really highlight the fact that AO3 was created and is maintained by fans. The people who volunteer there are also people who read fic and people who write fic. They get it.

Other features that I think are fantastic include, but are not limited to:

being able to have private bookmarks

being able to subscribe to a single fic, or to a fic series or to an author

the Fannish Next of Kin system whereby you can set a guardian for your fics in case of your death or incapacitation

site skins, which allow you to change the look and feel of the site to something that works best for you

the ability to have a pseudonym account on your main account, so if you want separate our your works that way you can

Tag Wranglers, who read all of the weird and wacky ways we tag our fics and make them searchable and filterable in the database

the search and filter capabilities!!

otp:true

the kudos feature, so I can still show love even when I don't have words

RSS feed capability

the ability to restrict access to my works and to restrict comments on my works

blocking and muting!

never having to click the Proceed button again

Anyone else have a favourite feature that I didn't list above? (if any of my points is new to you, lemme know - I'm always happy to do a deep dive)