A Friendly Pack of RSS Mutts: Be More Web Dog

Oh, yes, I keep forgetting that the open web is dead or is ended or all the web is swirling down an AI slop river of grey sludge. Just don’t tell the frisky dogs, who still know how to romp freely, share their toys, and build bits of web stuff with toys like RSS.

Just look at this crew.

This is all a bit of play but also real examples of putting together a Small Pieces Loosely Joined set of web tools built by individuals or by companies that freely share / open license them. This not at all anything that would be Serious Scalable Infrastructure. This is just the web as it was, and still can be.

A Dogs Only Mixed Feed Stream

Has Alan. gone totally full on canine crazy? Here’s the end, and prepare not be be dazzled. Yet.

Dogs Only (with RSS) is a flow of … dog content from various sources, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Instagram, TikTok all with that Never Dying Technology of RSS.

Now long, long ago in a web feeling like it was not far away, many of what are now mega silos of social media entrapment – twitter, instagram, youtube offered directly, out of their own box, RSS feeds for their services. I used them in my FeedWordPress aggregation course sites. Ahh but in time and stage 2 of the Recipe of Enshittification, these features were eviscerated.

So thus earlier this week I came across one tool that end arounded this limit, and another to swirl them together, and another, and another. Now we let the dogs out.

Open The Locked Doots with ByeDoom

Perhaps it was in the Mastodon flow, I now forget, that I stumbled into ByeDoom which as the ultimate feed finder is described as “Give a Link ? Get a Feed”

Add any public account from Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, X, TikTok or YouTube to quickly get a feed that you can add to your favorite reader.

Bonus: Add any website to quickly grab its existing feed as well.

https://byedoom.com/

If the account link has its own RSS feed already, ByeDoom will fetch it for you. And if not, like for Instagram, Facebook, Threads, et al, it actually/somehow creates one for you. To give it a go, I pondered, and as test, decided to make a mix of… accounts about dogs. I was able to get feeds for:

• Felixadog (Mastodon)- that’s my dog Felix, who’s Mastodon account uses one of my web gizmos to post any of my flickr photos that are tagged felix. Mastodon feeds are easy to find, you just take his profile URL and tack on .rss or https://social.ds106.us/@felixadog.rss
• Pimmthedog (Pixelfed) – okay, my other tog, or new puppy Pimm, has her own account. Why not? Again, as good Federated Services, RSS feeds are baked in- Pimm’s feed is https://pixelfed.ca/users/pimmthedog.atom
• Poppylane (Instagram) – I love Kin Lane’s rottweiler, Poppy, but I don’t go to Instagram much. Here is where ByeDoom worked its magic. Just paste in Poppy’s link, and BOOM! an RSS feed for the feedless IG

• Weratedogs (Threads) WeRateDogs is like on every platform, I just picked Threads to try it out. Actually I am not even sure I have been on Threads, bit with RSS I do not even have to go there. Another job for ByeDoom

• dogsoftiktok (TikTok) – Why not dogs of TikTok? I’ve almost never been on there either (I am so uncool), but again, with ByeDoom, I got me a feed.

ByeDoom (great name) is a project from the House of Kyle and his post really captures the Unenshittified Dog Spirit:

As I hear more and more people in my life share that they want to fully ditch social media, I’m obviously delighted.

That said, I (shockingly) have some thoughts…

First, for those going cold turkey and cutting it entirely out of their lives, just remember that “social media” is in no way the same as the wild, still-amazing overall Internet. Staying connected and informed remains more important than ever. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Second, for those that just can’t quit Zuck, Elon and the the whole merry gang, I get it. Change takes time. It took people years to tiptoe into “social media” and it’ll take just as long to get them back out again. I’m as guilty as anyone for shaming people about their personal digital choices, but I do fully understand that FOMO is a hard drug to kick, and burning all bridges makes it pretty hard to stay connected to the people and institutions you care about.

 If only we had some magical way to stay on top of updates across lots of sources without having to “follow” them through social media services! 

Oh right, we do, and we’ve had it for decades. It’s a standard called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and it’s a powerful way to follow lots of different sources that you pick all in one place, without ceding control to giant social media companies and their horrid, culture-destroying algorithms.

https://houseofkyle.com/2026/03/08/bye-doom/

Rock on Kyle, you rock like a Big Dog.

Mix ’em Together With rssrssrssrss

Fine, I have a set of feeds. And yes, I can (and did) add them to my own reader, Inoreader (the free version), in a folder called “Dogs Only”. Built in there, I can make an HTML click for the whole mix (or embed with an iframe), thus I can share a feed view.

But what could make it useful is if I could swirl all those feeds together. There’s a raft of these services (and has been for eons). Some of them are okay, some make you create accounts, somer make you wipe ads out of the way.

What a refreshing change it was to find rssrssrssrss (they say I can call it rss⁴). You add all your feeds to a form, click a button, and it returns a feed that represents them all.

It was that easy.

Then you click get permalink in the top right, and I get my super feed (yeah the URL is long).

But wait, what if I ever have to modify my mix? I did not make an account. Well this is neat, I just take my mix feed, and put it in the second form field, and now I can edit them all (heck maybe you can too?). It’s a clean, simple tool.

It’s made by the folks Buttondown and is offered open source.

Oh Give me OPML, Where the Buffalo Roam…

So fine, I have mixed those 5 feeds, what of you wanted to add them all to your own RSS reader? Sure you can do it one by one if you back them out of my rssrssrssrssrsssrssrss mix. But shareing feeds is so much more easy by a single subscription file, they olde trusty OPML format.

But for the love of Milkbones, do not manually build them! You can find a number of OPML makers, I landed on the fantastic OPML Maker from RSS Gizmos, itself one of many a fleet of other RSS pups created by Tara Calishain, the wizard behind ResearchBuzz, a site I have leaned on for great resources since the late 1990s.

In go the feeds to the gizmo

and out comes a downloadable OPML file –note, since the feeds made by ByeDoom lack meaningful titles, I did a few manual edits to the OPML to make it more useful if imported. If you import this set of feeds into a Reader (I can’t think of anyone who really would need such a set), they should end up as a separate folder of dog feeds.

Woof!

And a Bonus

Just by checking out the rssrssrssrss site I found a link to another tool from the same pack, caltorss which can convert a calendar (ics) feed to regular RSS. I don’t know what I would use it for, but it’s good to know.

Okay, nothing here is exactly practical, in the current phase of Everything must Increase Efficiency or Save Time or Solve Problems. The ByeDoom feeds would fail if Kyle’s house blew away. A vast majority of people would run away screaming from doing anything like this. And most folks these days would prefer just ponying up with Claude to just vibe a tool.

This is more about the possibility knowing what this creates and also a bit of celebrating the spirit of people who stil build and share stuff.

Play and tenacity and howling at the moon, be more web dog.

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Featured Image: Yet another human made remix. By moi. The Second-to Latest Gang of 6 flickr photo by carterse shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA 2.0) license with an overlay of a screenshot of my dogs only rss feed, plus Wikimedia commons image Generic Feed-icon.svg by Jahoe shared under  Mozilla Public License Version 1.1