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The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful.
What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.
Maybe I’m not understand what you’re asking. You want to build a list of feeds to follow, right? To avoid single point failure or censorship, right?
So stop asking for one link, and start telling us what topics you care about. There is no point in a non-custom list of RSS feeds. You need to start the process yourself.
If I asked just for the topics I care about then I’m not helping anyone else reading. I’m looking for the quality sources. The ones that aren’t filled with filler. The ones that have the key news stories and the oddball stuff.
I follow some of theguardian.com’s topical feeds - each tag and author has their own feed. It’s a UK-based site, but it has international editions and mostly does good quality centre-left journalism.