Conscious Reddit consumption using non-default RSS feeds.

Talking about a tool that makes my reddit consumption a bit more purposeful and integrated, using non-default RSS feeds.

Be aware this is a draft post — please adjust your expectations accordingly. Get in touch if this post could use an improvement.

This is a part of the 100 Days To Offload challenge.

Any reddit usage is consumption all the same. While Reddit does provide RSS feeds by default, they’re far less usable than what I am using now.

Self-hosting this fantastic tool by John Warne has been a giant shift in my day-time Reddit usage. I am now able to use Miniflux, my primary tool to pull content in, in an even better way.

To be clear, I was looking for a tool that was:

  • Low on resource usage.
  • Had a comments link in the feed.
  • Links to the post.
  • Tried to give me the content without having to open Reddit. Not a huge selling point.

Given that, I think this tool ticks a lot of boxes, and as a bonus:

  • Provides caching.
  • Pleasant web access.

What it does.

It gives you an RSS feed and a pretty pleasant user interface too to browse a subreddit based on a filtering criteria. That web access is easy to pass around to friends. 😉

For filtering, you can pick from: score, threshold, and posts per day. For most, my favorite is threshold, and for some subs, I like score.

Here’s the user interface in action with a “threshold” of 70%. This gets me hot posts in the subreddit r/india that cross 70% of the monthly average top score of the subreddit.

A screenshot of the web access interface, showing an HTML form to view and filter a subreddit, and results for r/india with a filter type of "Threshold" which is set at 70%. A button titled "RSS" sits at the top right.
The web interface.

Score is more usable in situations where you want to get in early in on the action, but also not get caught up in dozens of new posts.

The RSS button in the top right takes into account the current subreddit and the filtering criteria to give you a feed link to subscribe to.

Comments link in the feed!

Another thing that was really important to me was that the feed generator/provider include the comments link in the feed such that my Miniflux feed reader can pick it up.

You can see this in action below:

A screenshot of a reddit post from django. This is a self post, and Miniflux shows me the comments link. Additionally, it has fetched the content and added a "Post Permalink" link in the content body at the top.
An example entry in Miniflux from such an RSS feed.

If you find yourself getting into the endless scrolling trap, I would recommend this tool. 9/10.

Featured image by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com.

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