iamrobin - Blog

Using RSS to Follow Sub-Reddits

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A few month ago, I wrote about how I pulled all my favorite YouTube channels into my RSS feed to avoid falling into the autoplay/thumbnail trap. (That post is here)

Now, I’m applying the same principle to Reddit.

But why?

There are a few subreddits I truly enjoy. Niche communities where I can stay updated on specific topics and learn new things. They’re valuable enough that I don’t want to miss the best posts each day.

But, just like with YouTube, the problem is the packaging:

Infinite scroll makes it too easy to keep going “just one more post”
The Reddit website/app is full of distractions that have nothing to do with my interests
I’ve developed a habit of automatically opening the Reddit website on both my desktop and mobile whenever I’m bored – and that’s not a good thing.

My RSS reader, on the other hand, is a quiet, focused space. No popups, no infinite scroll, no clickbait thumbnails. If I can bring just the top Reddit posts I care about into my feed, I can consume them in the same mindful way as blogs, newsletters, and (now) YouTube videos.

Solution 1: Reddit’s Built-In RSS

It turns out Reddit already offers RSS feeds for any subreddit. You just have to tweak the URL to get the top N posts of the day. The format looks like this[^1]:

https://www.reddit.com/r/<subreddit>/top/.rss?sort=top&t=day&limit=N

For example, if I want the top 5 posts of today from r/dataisbeautiful and r/explainlikeimfive combined:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful+explainlikeimfive/top/.rss?sort=top&t=day&limit=5

✅ Advantages

No extra setup – works instantly, no tool, coding experience or API keys needed.
Customizable – combine multiple subreddits, change t=day to week or month, adjust limit to your preferred number of posts.

❌ Disadvantages

The feed is live – it always shows the current top posts for the chosen time range. If you check it in the morning and again in the evening, the content may have changed.
No advanced filtering – you can’t exclude certain domains, keywords, or NSFW content.
Sorting and ranking follow Reddit’s own algorithm, not custom scoring.

These drawbacks kept me from adding Reddit to my RSS reader for months, as they didn’t meet my needs. In particular, the fact that the posts could change every time the feed was refreshed was frustrating. On top of that, having the filtering and ranking tied to Reddit’s own algorithm didn’t give me the control I was looking for.

Solution 2: Upvote RSS

While Reddit’s built-in RSS is great for a quick win, I wanted more control. That’s where Upvote RSS comes in.

Upvote RSS is a self-hosted PHP tool built by John Warne that can pull in posts from Reddit (and other platforms like Hacker News or Lemmy) and filter them based on your own criteria – score thresholds, keywords, timeframes, and more.

It then outputs its own RSS feed, which you can add to your reader.

✅ Advantages

Advanced filtering – set minimum upvotes, block specific keywords, choose exact time ranges.
Custom scoring – sort by metrics you care about, not just Reddit’s defaults.
Enrichment – can fetch linked article text or media previews.

❌ Disadvantages

Requires hosting (you need a PHP server).
Needs some initial setup, including API keys for Reddit.
More complex than just pasting a URL.

How I set it up

I already have a PHP-capable server for other projects, so I didn’t need to rent anything new.

Here’s a quick overview of the steps I followed, just to give you an idea of the setup effort. For detailed instructions, I recommend checking the official Upvote RSS documentation (it’s well-written and easy to follow).

I've Created a new subdomain on one of my existing domains
Cloned the Upvote RSS project from GitHub on the php server
Created a .env file with my Reddit API credentials[^2]
Secured the .env file with a quick .htaccess rule so it can’t be downloaded
Accessed the Upvote RSS interface in the browser through my new subdomain and configured my Reddit feed
Copied the generated RSS URL into my feed reader.

Conclusion

The small amount of effort I put in at the beginning was definitely worthwhile (for me). This setup, combined with the YouTube-to-RSS[^3] approach I described earlier, has removed two of my biggest “just one more scroll” traps. My RSS reader is becoming the single point where I check for new content — without the noise.

[^1]: t=day shows the top posts from the last 24 hours. You can replace day with week, month, year, or all. limit sets the maximum number of posts returned (Reddit caps it at 100).

[^2]: To create a Reddit API application, go to reddit.com/prefs/apps and click “create app”. The CLIENT_ID is the short string under the app name, and the CLIENT_SECRET is the longer string labeled “secret.” Use your Reddit username as the REDDIT_USER.

[^3]: If you missed it, here’s my YouTube RSS post that started this whole process.

Using RSS to Follow YouTube Channels

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I want to share my approach to reducing the time I spend on YouTube and focusing only on the videos I proactively want to watch. I want to avoid being tricked into clicking on videos just because the thumbnail is catchy. But let’s start from the beginning:

Why actually?

Like everyone else, I love watching YouTube videos. Over the years, I’ve found and saved a great list of creators whose content I enjoy. I know that their videos will either teach me something in my areas of interest or simply entertain me.

But: I've developed a certain aversion to platforms that focus solely on grabbing your attention and keeping you engaged for as long as they can to make more money. This often leads to the familiar situation where you think, “I’ll just watch one more video, and then I’ll stop,” but before you know it, you’ve ended up watching ten videos instead. Oops!

Additionally: I really hate the concept of YouTube Shorts.

What I already tried

For a while, I used browser extensions[^1] to block everything that might distract me on YouTube — no comments, no suggestions, no autoplay, no homepage. Opening YouTube with this setup took me straight to my subscriptions, where I only saw videos from channels I had actively subscribed to. It worked well on desktop, but only there. Every time I switched browsers or used a different device, I had to set it all up again. Not ideal.

On the other hand, I already read most of my articles, blog posts, and newsletters in a centralized RSS feed[^2] — it’s my quiet, well-organized space for consuming content. But YouTube always pulled me out of that flow. So the following idea is quite obvious: why not bring the YouTube videos I actually want to watch into my RSS reader as well?

How I added all my YouTube channels to my RSS reader

The pragmatic (and far too time-consuming) way would be to open all subscribed youtube channels in the browser, copy the URL and add it as a new subscription in the RSS reader. However, in addition to the great effort involved, this method also has another problem: all of the channel's content is taken into account, including shorts, live streams, etc.. But I only want to have normal videos in my RSS reader.

Therefore I figured out a more automated way to import all channels at once:

1. Export the YouTube subscriptions

First, I exported specifically all my YouTube data using Google Takeout. The download includes a file called subscriptions.csv, which contains all the channels I’m subscribed to, along with their names, IDs, and URLs.

Subscriptions.csv downloaded with Google Takeout

2. Prepare the data for the RSS reader

Unfortunately, the data you’ve downloaded from the CSV file isn’t in the correct format just yet, but it contains all the necessary components we need. First, we need to convert all the channels to this format[^3]:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULF<channel_id>

There are two key differences in comparison to the URL you get straight out of youtube.

You need to use playlist_id instead of channel_id for the name of the URL parameter
You need to replace the UCC prefix of the channel ID with UULF[^4]

This format gives you only the regular videos — not Shorts, not livestreams, not anything else.

Second, my RSS reader (Unread) only supports importing feeds via .opml files. So the next step was to take the cleaned list of feed URLs and convert them into a valid OPML file.

To speed things up, I used ChatGPT. I pasted the list of channel IDs from the CSV and asked it to generate the proper feed URLs and output them as an .opml file. If you’re not into using AI for that, you can of course write a small script, use a spreadsheet + online converter or find some other ways.

Final .opml file with the correct URL structure

3. Import the OPML file

I imported the OPML file into my RSS reader — and that’s it. All the YouTube channels I care about, now right inside my feed reader. No homepage, no Shorts, no distractions.

[^1]: There are a number of browser extensions that block and hide various features and areas on YouTube. If you want to cover a specific case, just search for it and you will find what you are looking for.

[^2]: I'm currently using the RSS reader app Unread both on my mac and on mobile. Why? Because it does exactly what it's supposed to do. No more, no less.

[^3]: I discovered this solution in a comment on an open issue ticket in the GitHub repository of an RSS reader. Thank you MisuVir for this unsung comment!

[^4]: You can modify this prefix to suit your needs. The code “UULF” will select “long format videos only.” If you prefer, you can use “UULP” to filter for only popular videos, or “UUSH” to get only short videos. It seems that these codes were never officially released by YouTube. However, there’s a helpful overview on Stackoverflow.

The Software I Use

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What is it about?

I've listed all software and services that I currently use on regular basis (as of March 2025), added where they are from and if they are open source. Inspired by /uses pages on other personal websites[^1].

But why?

As a member of a (capitalist) society, one of the key ways you influence its structure is by making choices about the products you consume/purchase. When it comes to groceries, I already pay (some) attention to the origin of food products and whether they are sourced locally or from the other side of the globe. However, I’ve realized that in the digital space in which I spend a lot of time and in which my daily work takes place, I haven’t given it much thought until now. I have the feeling that, especially in the current times when the CEOs of large tech companies are not taking a political stance or following power-hungry autocrat, it makes more sense than ever before to think about the origin of the digital products that we use every day.

But it is important to say, that I do not want to make a blanket statement that software that comes from the US, Russia or China is worse or more morally reprehensible than software that comes from Europe, for example. In this overview I primarily want to get an idea from which countries the software comes from and what the ratio is. This way, I (hopefully) can make better decisions about whether I feel safe sharing my sensitive data with them or giving them my money and attention.

What I use

I’ve listed all the software I regularly use on both desktop (MacOS) and mobile (iOS) and tried to organize them into different categories.

🤖 Development

Software	Description	Location	Open Source
VSCode	IDE of my choice	🇺🇸 USA – Redmond	✅ The core of VS Code is open source and is licensed under the MIT license. However, the official version released by Microsoft contains proprietary elements, such as extensions and branding.
Zed	new IDE I'm currently trying out	🇺🇸 USA – San Francisco	✅
Hyper	Electron-based terminal emulator	🇺🇸 USA – San Francisco	✅
Docker	Containerization platform	🇺🇸 USA – Palo Alto	✅

📐 Design/Photography

Software	Description	Location	Open Source
Figma	Design tool for mainly everything	🇺🇸 USA – San Francisco	❌
Adobe Lightroom	Photo editing + organisation	🇺🇸 USA – San Jose	❌
Affinity Designer	Design tool for vector stuff	🇬🇧 UK – Nottingham	❌
Inkscape	Vector Design tool to control my pen plotter	🌍 Community-driven	✅
Eagle	Digital asset and inspiration manager	🇹🇼 Taiwan	❌

🗞️ Media/Social media

Software	Description	Location	Open Source
Mastodon	decentralized social network	🇩🇪 Germany – Jena	✅
Tidal	Music streaming	🇳🇴 Norway – Oslo TIDAL was founded in Norway by Aspiro but later acquired by a group of artists led by Jay-Z. Today, it is majority-owned by Block, Inc. (USA), though its origins remain Norwegian.	❌
Pocket Casts	Podcast player	🇺🇸 USA – San Francisco	✅
Reeder	RSS reader	🇨🇭 Switzerland	❌

💬 Communication

Software	Description	Location	Open Source
Slack	chat for work	🇺🇸 USA – San Francisco	❌
Discord	communities	🇺🇸 USA – San Francisco	❌
Signal	preferred private chat	🇺🇸 USA – Mountain View	✅
WhatsApp	private chat I want to ditch	🇺🇸 USA – Menlo Park	❌
Telegram	private chat I want to ditch	🇦🇪 UAE – Dubai Telegram is officially headquartered in Dubai, but its origins trace back to Russia. Over the years, the company has relocated multiple times, primarily due to regulatory and privacy concerns.	❌

🗂️ Organisation/Notes

Software	Description	Location	Open Source
Obsidian	Markdown note taking tool	🇨🇦 Canada Obsidian is developed by Dynalist Inc., a company based in Canada.	❌
Apple Mail	mail client	🇺🇸 USA – Cupertino	❌
Apple Calendar	calendar client	🇺🇸 USA – Cupertino	❌
Raindrop	Bookmark manager	🇰🇿 Kazakhstan	❌

⚫ General/Misc

Software	Description	Location	Open Source
Zen Browser	Current browser of my choice (firefox fork)	-	✅
Raycast	Mac OS spotlight alternative	🇬🇧 UK – Cheshire	❌
MoneyMoney	Personal finance management app	🇩🇪 Germany – Düsseldorf	❌
1Password	Password manager	🇨🇦 Canada – Toronto	❌
Yoink	Drag-and-drop file manager	🇦🇹 Austria – Vienna	❌
CleanShot	Tool for making screenshots/screen recordings	🇵🇱 Poland	❌
Synology Drive	File syncing and sharing solution for my Synology NAS	🇹🇼 Taiwan – Taipei	❌
Backblaze	Cloud backup service for all my NAS data	🇺🇸 USA – San Mateo	-
Strava	Tracking app for cycling and running	🇺🇸 USA – San Francisco	-

The ratio

Distribution by Country

Distribution by Continent

Distribution by Software Licensing Models

My conclusion

There isn’t a clear conclusion — at least not one that leads to immediate action. While it's striking that 52% of the software I use comes from the US, I’m pleasantly surprised by the variety of countries represented.

Still, two patterns stand out and give me pause:

First, every piece of software I rely on professionally to earn a living as a developer comes from the US. As far as I know, there are no serious alternatives that wouldn’t disrupt my workflow and significantly reduce my productivity.

Second, I’m uneasy about the origins of the communication tools I use daily. I’d prefer European alternatives due to their stronger data protection laws, but, as with social media platforms, getting people to switch is difficult. Familiarity and widespread adoption keep users locked into existing services, making it hard to transition to what might actually be a better option.

Perhaps this blog post encourages you to take a moment to consider where the software you use every day comes from and what impact that has — especially when it comes to data privacy. The choices we make, even when they seem small, shape the digital world we rely on.

[^1]: I love exploring /uses pages on personal websites and always find it fascinating to see what tools others rely on. It’s a great way to discover new software I might not have known about. A great collection of such pages can be found at uses.tech.