What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows you to keep track with the latest updates or posts from your favorite social media sites. It is by far the best way to consooome content, without having ads constantly being targeted towards you. RSS essentially prevents you from being distracted as well because there is no way for you to be manipulated by clickbait thumbnails on YouTube for example, which you otherwise would have clicked on if you were on the actual site. I personally get all my updates from RSS feeds which can be found on most sites, I hardly ever actually go on YouTube or Twitter anymore.
In case you didn't know, in order to receive updates in the form of RSS, you have to use an RSS reader. On my Arch Linux machine, I use Newsboat because it is highly extensible and easy to use. There are two main files, one for configuring the actual interface of the program and another for adding links. There might be a better RSS client out there, but this is what I use for now and it hasn't failed me yet.
Here are going to be some ways that you can find RSS feeds for common social media sites, which may not seem so obvious. Usually, you can directly find RSS feeds on blog sites or even merely personal websites such as the one I have. If you have a decent web browser, then that could possibly detect it as well without the need of you intervening. Some sites such as YouTube can make it look hard for you to find a direct link to an RSS feed for some specific "content creator", but that's only because they want you to keep visiting their online site so that you would click on random videos and get them money.
YouTube
One of the most centralized sites that can be found on the internet is YouTube. Unfortunately, many even view the internet as YouTube which is definitely not why the internet came into existence in the first place. The problem lies in how their mechanism for recommending videos work, it's so accurate that they can basically waste hours of your life without you even realizing it. So, it is important that you just don't go on it in the first place, while still receiving updates on new video posts, etc. Thankfully, YouTube still has support for RSS feeds, so why not take advantage of that and save yourself hours of what could have been wasted time.
All RSS feed links for YouTube start with https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVO8YsD87ibqRGIJ7o8sOzg, but they usually have different channel ID strings. In this case, the channel ID is starting with U. Many of the channel IDs typically start with U, so instead of using the one I provided just replace it with your own channel ID alternatively. You can ordinarily find these channel IDs in the channel page URL itself, or by viewing the source code of that particular YouTube channel and searching for the channelID by using ctrl-f to search.
Once you have the channel ID, then just substitute it into the formatted link which I have provided and put that into your url file for your specific RSS reader. That link will go directly to the YouTube page and from your RSS reader, you will have the ability to view all updates and posts without actually going on the site. It is basically the equivalent to being "subscribed" to a YouTube channel, except it's via RSS. I usually stream/download videos from my RSS reader by using mpv and youtube-dl, so I don't have to go on YouTube at all.
Nittr.net is fundamentally a Twitter proxy for the actual Twitter site, it doesn't use bloated javascript and no spying software. Nittr, also has the capability of generating RSS feeds for any Twitter account, so you can just use that link to receive tweets and whatnot from various people. You can discover these links in the upper right-hand corner on their site.
Even when using Twitter just in general, it's much better to use a proxy such as this one because then the Twitter site can't actually benefit from you being on it, as they otherwise would have. This is traditionally done in the form of data-mining which is common among these large-scale social media platforms. You also don't need a Twitter account in the first place when using this proxy and that's really handy if you don't want to sign up for one.
Use RSS-bridge for generating Facebook RSS feeds, as well as for any site in general. It is essentially an RSS feed helper than can be used for a broad range of sites, not just for Facebook pages.
If you want to, you can even run the software on a server. This would allow you to search the internet for instances that could generate RSS feeds. And then all you have to do is insert the link for the website that you would like an RSS feed for and RSS-bridge will automatically generate an RSS feed. I solely use this one for Facebook pages, as those can sometimes be a bit harder to generate RSS feeds for, without the help of some sort of RSS helper like RSS-bridge.
GitHub/GitLab
For sites such as GitHub and GitLab, you don't have to use RSS-bridge for, as they already offer RSS feeds for watch activity on different repositories. I believe there are some kind of RSS feed generators out there for these particular sites, but there is no need for that because they usually follow the standard format which you can find down below.
If you're interested in watching the development of my dotfiles, just add https://github.com/nenadstoisavljevic/archrice/commits/master.atom. Likewise, you can watch the development on GitLab as well by adding https://gitlab.com/nenadstoisavljevic/archrice/-/commits/master?format=atom.
It is pretty self-explanatory, just replace my name and repo name for the one which you want to generate the RSS feed for. You can use these formatted links for any user and repo on GitHub or GitLab. GitLab makes it more convenient because they provide the option for autogenerating RSS feeds when you go to view the history/commits of any repository.
There is also an option for getting a "private feed" and that simply lists more info about the repo such as who is following you, etc.
My RSS Feeds:
The first link is for my feed/weblog and the second is for my dotfiles on GitHub.
https://stoisavljevic.com/rss.xml
https://github.com/nenadstoisavljevic/archrice/commits/master.atom