Everything is RSSible: RSSHub Brings Back the Feed

Remember RSS? That quiet, reliable protocol that let you subscribe to websites and get updates without algorithms or ads? It never really went away, but finding feeds for modern sites—social media, newsletters, dynamic content—became a hassle. What if you could just make a feed for anything? That’s exactly what RSSHub does.

It’s a tool built by and for developers who miss the simplicity of pulling content their own way. In a world of walled gardens and noisy timelines, RSSHub gives you a quiet backdoor to subscribe to almost anything on the web, on your own terms.

What It Does

RSSHub is an open-source, extensible RSS feed generator. In simple terms, it takes content from websites that don’t offer a native RSS feed—think Twitter timelines, YouTube channels, GitHub repos, Instagram tags, or even data from APIs—and turns it into a clean, standard RSS feed. It acts as a middleware aggregator, parsing and structuring web content into a format your favorite RSS reader can understand.

Why It’s Cool

The magic of RSSHub is in its ecosystem. It’s not just a single scraper; it’s a platform with hundreds of community-built "routes." These routes are essentially plugins that teach RSSHub how to parse a specific website or service. Want an RSS feed for a Substack newsletter, a filter for specific Reddit flairs, or updates from a Trello board? There’s likely a route for it.

The implementation is cleverly straightforward. You interact with it via URL patterns. For example, to get a Twitter user’s tweets as a feed, you’d use a route like /twitter/user/DIYgod. This makes it incredibly easy to use and integrate. It’s self-hostable, giving you full control over your data and request rates, and it’s built with Node.js, making it accessible for many developers to contribute new routes or modify existing ones.

For developers, it’s a dream tool for content aggregation. You can use it to pipe updates from various services into a personal dashboard, monitor brand mentions, track project dependencies, or automate content collection—all via simple HTTP requests to your own instance.

How to Try It

The easiest way to get a feel for RSSHub is to use its public instance at https://rsshub.app. Browse the extensive documentation to find the route for the service you’re interested in. For example, visit https://rsshub.app/github/trending/daily to see a feed of GitHub’s daily trending repos.

For full control and to avoid rate limits, you’ll want to self-host. Deployment is well-documented:

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub.git
cd RSSHub

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start the server
npm start

The server will run on http://localhost:1200. You can deploy it with Docker, on VPS providers, or even on serverless platforms. Check the GitHub repository for detailed deployment guides.

Final Thoughts

RSSHub feels like a love letter to the open web. It’s a practical, powerful tool that solves a real problem: content fragmentation. As a developer, it empowers you to build your own information intake system, free from platform interference. Whether you’re a privacy-conscious user, a developer building an aggregator, or just someone who prefers a chronological list in a good RSS reader, RSSHub is worth setting up. It quietly proves that, yes, everything really is "RSSible."

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