Liberating Yourself from Algorithms

An Introduction to RSS Feeds by H. Martins

So, I have had this piece sitting on the docket for a while. What has inspired me to post this is Skilos’ egregore series. For anime fans, which I am not really, you can begin to understand egregores through a certain degenerate anime (its ending themes may be pieces of art but its teenage watchers…*bonk*), In a realistic paradigm, the concept bears more neutral connotations. Besides that, I got to talk to some good guys a few nights ago and I ran a couple of things by them. They said that something like this guide would be useful. I also asked whether a navigation guide to some of the sphere would be useful, so keep an eye out for that page. I’ll start with what I know best: publishing houses.

Now, as to how I got into RSS feeds. I got a smart phone late, around the age of 14 when I had entered high school. When I was younger, we couldn’t afford a personal computer for me on top of what my parents used for work, so I grew up using a credit card sized Raspberry Pi model 3b+, with its glorious 1GB of RAM, and became accustomed to GNU Linux and FOSS. When I found myself isolated during COVID in 2020 as my high school shut down, I naturally wanted to know what was going on in the world. However, I had sworn off social media, so I did what was natural to me and just used RSS feeds.

It seems to me that many in our sphere suffer from a condition called “being terminally online.” What if I told you that there was a way that you could build a level of separation between you and endless scrolling that is not managed by an algorithm, unless you are the algorithm, and that allows you to remain up to date with everything? This old, by technological standards, method is to use RSS/Atom feeds. These feeds may be used in certain browsers, dedicated apps, and various other synchronizing things, including email clients like Thunderbird. Now, it does not work for everything, but it does work for most things. It is a simple way to centralize your interests into one app that doesn’t necessarily have notifications, but lets you keep up with what you’ve missed on your own terms. You might be subject to the whims of your sphere, but it will be by your choice to include such things into your viewing habits. Let’s go through some examples.

YouTube

Let us say that you want to subscribe to Mr. John Doyle’s YouTube channel. Maybe you use some FOSS app like NewPipe that lets you block ads but doesn’t give notifications. Or, maybe you don’t want to end up looking at brainrot for an hour. Well, you go to Mr. Doyle’s YouTube channel. You click on more. You scroll down and hit share. Then you copy his channel ID: UCzZpgppwC_XQMe8lFiI77-Q. You take this little bundle of joy and you slap it right into this formula:

https://youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[CHANNEL ID]

This leaves you with Mr. Doyle’s channel feed as: https://youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzZpgppwC_XQMe8lFiI77-Q. You then copy that, put it in an RSS feed app, and voila you have got YouTube channel updates.

Reddit

Now, I am sure there are some degenerates among us. You are sitting there and the ‘tisme is acting up. You find that you can no longer help yourself. And so you just have to go onto the vexillology subreddit. Well, how do you get updates without really fooling around with the platform? So, just like YouTube, you follow a formula:

https://reddit.com/r/[SUBREDDIT]/new/.rss

Your flag ‘tisme can be immediately satiated with this RSS feed: https://reddit.com/r/vexillology/new/.rss.

Twitter

Now, this one is a little janky. Used to, you could setup RSS feeds via Twitter, but I’m not sure how well it works since Musk took over. I don’t think it does but you are welcome to try. There is a third party utility that used to work called nitter.net. The formula for this one was as follows:

https://nitter.net/USERNAME/rss

Substack, Other Sites, and Podcasts

You might be shocked to learn that RSS works for most other sites. For substacks you can just use NAME.substack.com/feed. Other sites usually have links, which look like an orange and white wifi symbol at the top of the page. If a substack you like does podcasts, you can slap its RSS into a podcast app to download the episodes. This works great for Mindphaser or even the inspiring podcast for this article. Android has AntennaPod, though I am not sure what Apple has these days.

Conclusion

Now you know about a way to control your own news, put most of your interests into one place, and know when you have new stuff to read or watch. As far as feed aggregators go, I’d recommend Feeder for Android. I recommend this article: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/news-aggregators/. It has the formula’s for some of the feeds as well as other need to know information about opsec and system hardening on the site. Feeds can usually be exported to OPML files. If someone wants certain sites dealing with particular topics, give them an OPML file and have them import it. I didn’t do that so that you can get a sense of how RSS works by manually adding feeds.

It is my hope that someone gets some use from this. I hope it allows some people to cut down on social media and time spent trying to find sites and articles and act as a resource for people new to the sphere. At the very least, it allows you to engage the material that you want to engage when you want to engage it without worrying about loosing an article if you put your phone down for a while. If you are one of those people that’s been trying to get rid of social media but haven’t yet because you want to keep up with things, now you can. For your benefit, I have provided a slew of RSS feeds below, so that you can get an idea of how RSS feeds usually appear. You can copy any of those feeds into a feed reader and it will sync the feed and deliver articles.

RSS Feeds of the Sphere

Christianity

https://americanreformer.org/feed/atom

https://evangelicaldarkweb.org/feed/atom

https://protestia.com/feed/

https://truthscript.com/feed/atom/

https://www.lifesitenews.com/feed/

https://crisismagazine.com/news/feed

Guns

https://enblocpress.com/rss/

https://www.firearmspolicy.org/news.rss

https://www.gunowners.org/feed/atom

https://www.saf.org.category/ijp/feed/atom

https://nationalgunrights.org/feed/atom

https://www.saf.org.category/news/feed/atom

http://nraila.org/feeds/ilarss/

https://tennesseefirearms.com/feed/atom

https://thereload.com/feed/atom

Rightist E-Mags

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/feed/

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/feed/atom

https://counter-currents.com/feed/

https://mansworldmag.online/feed/atom

https://www.postliberalorder.com/feed

https://www.takimag.com/feed/atom

https://www.americanpostliberal.com/feed

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/feed/

https://www.unz.com/xfeed/rss/all/

Substack Examples

http://cascadefrontier.substack.com/feed

http://hmartinsgazette.substack.com/feed

https://oldgloryclub.substack.com/feed

https://vespertide.substack.com/feed

Podcast Feed Examples from Substack

https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/174242/s/8363.rss (Thomas777’s Mindphaser)

http://cascadefrontier.substack.com/feed (You can plug in normal article RSS links, and normal articles will show, but if the feed has both articles and audio you will be able to download audio files)

Youtube Channel Updates

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCD-oR9vkso3JPPKK8-CWqgQ (Zoomer Historian)