Hidden RSS feeds: Reddit, GitHub, YouTube, and more sites that still publish one

Reddit, GitHub, and YouTube all still publish RSS feeds for pretty much everything on their sites. You'd never know it from the pages themselves. No feed icon, no mention in settings, nothing. The feeds work fine. They're just unlisted.

I tested every URL pattern in this post before writing it, because a lot of the "hidden RSS feeds" posts out there are recycling each other from 2019. Here's what actually works today, where the rate limits are, and how to find a feed on almost any site that still has one.

Reddit: add .rss to almost any URL

Stick .rss on the end of a subreddit, a user profile, a search, or a multireddit, before any query string, and you get a working feed. It survived the 2023 API changes that killed off most of the third-party Reddit ecosystem, and it still works today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/.rss
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/top/.rss?t=week
https://www.reddit.com/user/some-username/.rss

The same sort and time filters the website supports work in the URL too, so a weekly top-posts feed for a subreddit is one query string away.

One caveat, and I hit it myself while testing. Reddit rate-limits these endpoints hard, roughly one request per IP every 30 to 60 seconds. My first request came back with a valid feed and a header saying I had zero requests left. The second one got a 429. So if you paste a few subreddit feeds into your browser back to back and they start failing, that's a rate limit, not the feeds being broken. A feed reader stays under the limit by spreading its fetches out on a schedule instead of loading everything at once. Adding several in a row is just slow, because each one waits its turn.

GitHub: three feeds per repo, zero setup

Every public GitHub repo exposes Atom feeds for releases, tags, and commits. No configuration, no token, nothing to enable.

https://github.com/:owner/:repo/releases.atom
https://github.com/:owner/:repo/tags.atom
https://github.com/:owner/:repo/commits.atom

The releases feed is the one I'd recommend. Subscribe to it for the dependencies you work with, and you find out the moment a maintainer cuts a release instead of whenever you next remember to check the repo.

YouTube: a feed for every channel, no API key

Every public YouTube channel exposes an XML feed of its 15 most recent uploads. No login, no API quota to burn through.

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

The channel ID is the part of a /channel/ URL that starts with "UC". If all you have is a handle URL (/@somechannel), you need to visit the channel to resolve it to the ID first, but once you have that, the feed just works. It's also the closest you can get to a subscriptions page that YouTube doesn't reorder for you.

Mastodon: .rss works on profiles and hashtags

Any Mastodon instance serves RSS for a public profile or a hashtag page. Append .rss to the URL. I tested both patterns against mastodon.social and both came back clean.

https://mastodon.social/@username.rss
https://mastodon.social/tags/rss.rss

You only get that account's public posts. No boosts you didn't ask for, no algorithm deciding what sits on top. Just the posts, in the order they were written.

Stack Overflow: a feed for every tag

Every tag page on Stack Overflow exposes an Atom feed of new questions. No account, no key.

https://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/typescript

Swap in whatever you follow, a language, a framework, a library. Watching a tag's feed is a surprisingly fast way to notice when a breaking change starts confusing everyone at once.

How to find a feed on any other site

Not every site is this tidy about it, but plenty still declare a feed inside the page itself. View the page source and search for this in the head:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="...">

WordPress, Ghost, and most static-site blogs (Hugo, Jekyll, plenty of hand-built Next.js sites) still emit that tag, years after the visible icon disappeared. And when the tag isn't there, the URL is often guessable anyway. Try /feed, /feed/, /rss, /rss.xml, or /atom.xml on the site root or a section. It won't always work, but it works far more often than you'd think.

Why the feeds are all hidden

So why do these companies keep the feeds running and hide them at the same time? Because RSS costs almost nothing to serve, and a feed gives them nothing to count. A subscriber in a feed reader doesn't see ads, doesn't log in, and can't be recommended anything. Every company on this list would rather you follow them inside their app, where your attention can be measured and sold. The feed stayed because removing it would break tooling people rely on. The icon left because advertising the feed costs them money.

None of these feeds needed an API key, a developer account, or anyone's permission. They were already public.

Using them in Riverbed

Once you have a feed URL, Riverbed treats it like any other subscription. Paste it in, and it reads in order next to everything else you follow. If you're still choosing between readers, see choosing a feed reader, and if you want the bigger argument for RSS itself, that's what RSS still solves in 2026.