Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

jakob · 2025-06-03 07:59:13

Does anyone know of a reliable Site-to-RSS service like OpenRSS? I’m thinking of sites that ingest a social media timeline – instagram, bluesky, threads – and turn it into an rss-feed.

The background:

For years I used Tweetledee on my server to generate an RSS feed from Twitter accounts, which was then ingested by sml_xml to embed a custom timeline that matched the site’s design and didn’t track casual visitors.

That service is now defunct since everyone’s favourite billionaire took it over and now that Twitter’s days are over, I’ve now been asked to embed a Bluesky timeline.

Bluesky does provide an RSS feed of its own, but it’s very sparse, with seemingly just the titles and no post content or re-posts. I’d ideally like to make the output match the site’s design and not spam or track its visitors, hence my interest in an RSS-style solution.

After stumbling across various paid-services (like rss.app that looks free but is actually only free for 7 days), I found OpenRSS. It worked straight away, and I thought I’d struck gold. However, it seems they have been hammered by bots, and have thus restricted their service to only update feeds to verified RSS apps. So, I wrote to them explaining my low-usage situation and asking for verification, but it seems their service is not designed for personal usage, and they said flat-out “no”. The openrss.org site seems to be down at the time of writing, so they may be fighting more general problems. Perhaps there is some way of using OpenRSS with a verified self-hosted RSS app, and then sourcing a new rss feed from that app to embed a timeline, but before I try to cobble together a relay of many working parts, I thought I’d ask if you know of any alternatives.

I don’t have access to the Bluesky account in question, so can’t use the account’s password credentials (I may be able to ask them to create an app password, though). I found I was able to successfully embed a timeline using the bsky-embed (GitHub) webcomponent. It does work well, showing more actual post content and re-posts, but … at 1.3 MB, the js is anything but lean, and … frustratingly … the webcomponent setup makes it hard to style to match the site**. Webcomponents have their own shadow DOM that you can’t target directly via CSS, and anyway it uses tailwind making it difficult to target specific elements. You can squish it into a narrower container and enforce some font styles for the container’s child selectors, but it still breaks out of its box at times. It would do for an unfussy client not too bothered about display anomalies but I’m not entirely sold on it.

There are various home-grown bluesky PHP SDKs out there, which might be possible candidates but again look like a lot to install on a site just to embed a clean, non-spammy timeline. For example, I don’t need to post to Bluesky from the homepage, so I have no need for full-blown user-authentication that a lot of these SDKs come with.

Long story short: I’m still on the lookout for a good site-to-RSS service … or maybe another idea of how to simply embed a timeline. I’d especially be interested in using something like this to embed lo-fi Instagram feeds without spamming visitors.*

*To be clear: I think it’s legit for services want to track visitors on their own sites but invasive that they track users on other sites even when they do not interact with the widgets.

**EDIT: must correct myself: the bsky-embed webcomponent does provide a method for injecting own styles into the webcomponent, so you do have a bit more styling control.

Bloke · 2025-06-03 13:49:25

Hmmm, a conundrum. RSS was such a useful thing until social media replaced it as a platform for people with the loudest voices.

The only viable one I can find is RSSHub. All the rest seem to want an arm and a leg or are just readers.

Oh, there’s also PolitePol if you can stay under the usage limits.

Not really sure if either of those has the functionality you need.

jakob · Yesterday 08:52:29

Just documenting some links as I go along. A lot of sites have problems or proviso-notices with RSS-ing Instagram timelines.

RSS.app work (but is paid). It did work with both Bluesky and Insta in my tests so far.
RSSBridge provides semi-feeds and is open-source and self-hostable. Add format=atom to the end of the URL instead of html to get an xml feed. The official hosted version is at rss-bridge.org/bridge01/ while other public hosts are listed at rss-bridge.github.io/rss-bridge/General/Public_Hosts.html. It did work directly with an Insta feed ~~but not with my (simpler) Bluesky example~~ (turns out you must enter “Bluesky” not an url in the search, then “show more” beneath the Bridge, then add your feed credentials and settings to generate a feed; it’s not auto-discovered).
FetchRSS (with a low-use limited free tier, then plans). Doesn’t work without an account. Doesn’t support Instagram, but does support Bluesky.

I’ve no idea about their respective reliability…

colak · Yesterday 15:40:42

Hi Julian, maybe you should also check the suggestions on zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/.

Bloke · Yesterday 15:48:24

Nice list but I’m not sure Julian needs an RSS reader… from my understanding he needs something to take a bunch of posts from a third party service and aggregate the latest stuff into some format (such as RSS or JSON or XML) that can be presented and marked up on a website as “here’s the latest social posts from me…”

Might be wrong. Of course, if any of the RSS apps mentioned have open source code that can be reverse engineered to provide the above functionality, then happy days.

Last edited by Bloke (Yesterday 15:50:27)

jakob · Yesterday 18:10:24

Yes, I’m looking for a reliable, free or low-cost site-to-rss feed generator for sites that don’t offer a (useful) RSS feed. Some locally installable RSS readers such as Tiny Tiny RSS say they can aggregate feeds, but I couldn’t work out how, and I suspect it’s restricted to combining existing feeds rather than making feeds for sites that don’t offer them.

Bloke · Yesterday 20:11:17

I thought the BlueSky API might be a suitable source, but the atproto.dart SDK on which it’s built is 40MB before any dependencies have been downloaded! That’s truly insane. Can nobody write lean code these days?!

Bloke · Yesterday 20:43:03

Oooh, stop press. This BlueSky PHP API looks small (primarily becuase they haven’t actually finished mapping the entire API yet!) but it seems to be able to use authenticated (password) access to a user’s feed/posts and also unauthorised public (cached) access via the public bluesky endpoint.

The ‘testing’ example looks pretty simple. There’s a ‘posts’ test about halfway down the file to grab all posts by a user in a few lines of code. Not sure where all the tokens come from though.

Last edited by Bloke (Yesterday 20:49:08)

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#1 2025-06-03 07:59:13

Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

#2 2025-06-03 13:49:25

Re: Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

#3 Yesterday 08:52:29

Re: Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

#4 Yesterday 15:40:42

Re: Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

#5 Yesterday 15:48:24

Re: Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

#6 Yesterday 18:10:24

Re: Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

#7 Yesterday 20:11:17

Re: Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

#8 Yesterday 20:43:03

Re: Anyone know of independent RSS aggregators like OpenRSS?

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