RSS Starter Packs
Publised: 2025-05-07 Updated: 2025-05-16I was inspired by BlueSky's meteoric growth, especially compared to Mastodon's. One of the things so many people liked about BlueSky was how easy onboarding was. Especially with their "Starter Packs" feature.
So, on my quest as an RSS evangelist, I thought it would be a good idea to create a similar starter packs for RSS. Some of these fall into the "independant web" category, some don't.
Contributing: I would encourage anyone else to publish their own starter packs, but I also welcome suggestions to add to mine. Just shoot me an email, or message on my guestbook. The only catch is I don't want you reccomending your own blog or website. (This saves the awkwardness of me having to reject your own site if I don't think it fits the bill lol)
The Starter Packs
Web Comics
Sometimes you need pictures.
Famous webcomic amongst science types. Literally every science degree person I know loves it.
A webcomic with humor and wit.
A webcomic with a mix of science, and humor.
One of the most famous webcomics of all time. He also made exploding kittens and unstable unicorns if you are into board games.
Tech News
Stay up-to-date with the latest technology news and developments
They track the random cool DIY and FOSS projects people make and 3D print
Business-related articles from Wired Magazine. **Note**: You can subscribe to wired's all articles feed, but it is too full of affiliate marketting slop so I prefer to select a couple individual feeds.
AI-related articles from Wired Magazine. **Note**: You can subscribe to wired's all articles feed, but it is too full of affiliate marketting slop so I prefer to select a couple individual feeds.
Longform articles from Wired Magazine. **Note**: You can subscribe to wired's all articles feed, but it is too full of affiliate marketting slop so I prefer to select a couple individual feeds.
Personal Blogs
Thoughtful blogs by individual writers on tech, science, and culture
My longer posts about technology, science, and culture.
Cory Doctorow's Blog. He writes an essay just about every day about big tech / politics
A "Rationalist" web blog. Lots of interesting science, posts about society and knowledge.
Monthly Newsletter with collections of links to cool random spots on the web. E.g. [My Quest to Find the Owner of a Mysterious WWII Japanese Sword.](https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/world-war-ii-japanese-sword/)
Friend of the site, he posts longform rants about tech, politics, and the state of the web.
She mostly blogs about her personal life, but she is a nice writer and has interesting opinions sometimes.
Talks about computers and the internet, and computing as cheaply as possible.
Bigly into the 'IndieWeb' like me. Posts about CyberSec, technology and blogging. Super Groovy website as well. Look around his site not just the feed IMHO. He has a whole bunch of different feeds, but that one captures everything (I think)
Molly White's Blog. She mostly writes longform about Crypto Grifts, but also occasionally about broader important internet things. She is a relatively important Wikipedia Contributor.
Australian News
News sources focused on Australian current events and investigative journalism.
Just a 5 minute read newsletter. Ad supported summary of what the current news is.
Independent Journos. Great investigational journalism into Australian politics.
Better political coverage than any mainstream journos. Also interesting niche topics covered by independent journos.
Aus Satire News
Satirical news sources from Australia, blending humor with current events.
Food And Drinks
Mostly drinks tbh.
Robert is a data scientist (at Apple last I checked?) who does science on coffee. These days mostly on roasting, but his backlog is filled with actionable info on grind, dose and etraction.
A beer blogger, who writes about the cultural aspects of beer.
AI News
I really like keeping up with the specifics in current ML research. These are my favourite feeds.
He is a researcher at Mozilla and pretty smart
He is a youtuber, who also runs a weekly newsletter, the newsletter recaps 3 new papers on AI research every week.
He writes about the very specifics and mathematics of LLMs/Diffusion Models
Insights and analysis on AI and its applications
Note: The behaviour of the OPML file button may vary depending on your browser settings. Some browsers may open the OPML file directly in the browser, while others may prompt you to download it. If you want to download the OPML file directly, right-click the button and select "Save link as..." or "Download linked file".
YouTube
I won't pressume to tell you what to watch on youtube. You can subscribe to your preffered channels with RSS however. The catch is that Google does its best to keep the RSS feeds hidden.
Most can be found by putting the channels URL into your RSS reader. E.g. I added a_lillian's channel by putting https://www.youtube.com/@a_lilian into my RSS reader (Newsflash). The URL it found was https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2v0x4g1j7X3c5r8b6e9Q
With obscuration like this, I make no guarantees of how reliable this method is. If you can figure out the channel ID, you can use that to identify the RSS feed directly.
Social Feeds:
You can also use RSS to follow a lot of social media feeds..html to the end of the adrress.
E.g. mine is: https://aus.social/@AuntyRed.rss Other Feeds:
OpenRSS
OpenRSS runs a service bolting on RSS feeds to a number of other services which either do not have native feeds, or provide improved feeds with more user control.
They seem cool, but they're also a donation run third party service. So that consider if the extra features are worth it to you, and maybe throw them a few bucks to pay your way if you do use it.
Some of the platforms supported by OpenRSS include:
- Apple
- Bandcamp
- Bing
- Bluesky
- Craigslist
- Discuit
- eBay
- GitHub
- JustWatch
- Internet Archive
- Kickstarter
- Lemmy
- Locals
- Medium
- Mastodon
- Meetup
- PocketCasts
- Rumble
- Spotify
- Substack
- TikTok
- Tumblr
- Twitch
- YouTube