As much as I hate to admit it sometimes there *is* useful information posted on Reddit. At the end of the day despite the cesspool it’s turned into it was originally intended to be a link aggregation/sharing platform, and some communities are still useful for that purpose if you stay out of the comment section.
But the apps SUCK, the site SUCKS, and old.reddit is the only viable option these days even though it’s still full of tracking and the comment sections. However there’s a little work around for all this; RSS.
Some RSS platforms like Inoreader let you add subreddits as feeds, but there’s really spotty history of these working and then breaking, and working then breaking etc etc. They’re most likely hitting rate limits, or fighting the scraper arms race and losing every now and then, so I wanted a diversified alternative.
The Alternative
I give you…. this janky codebase! Full disclosure, this was written while I was watching Hoarders so try and ignore the quality.
The tl;dr here is that this is a very simple, barebones Flask app that does nothing until you give it a subreddit to generate a feed for. It uses your own API keys to fetch data from Reddit so you will still need an account, or at the very least someone else’s keys.
What it does do:
- Connects to the reddit API to GET posts and subreddits
- Returns a mostly well structured RSS XML blob
- Ignores NSFW/SFW status of subreddits, there is no filtering
What it does not do;
- Consider any previous feeds, de-duplication needs to be handled by your reader based on the URL/GUID (some readers do this, such as Inoreader!).
- Rank or re-arrange posts. We use reddits ‘hot’ sorting method for this, which is generally the default view of most subreddits anyway.
- In future I may add more endpoints to allow for top/new/controversial etc feeds, but I don’t personally see the use in that.
This is still being tinkered with, and it’s missing a lot of stuff but as it is right now it seems to work fine. Feel free to test it out at;
reddit.zacb.id.au/rss/<a subreddit of your choice>
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