Reddit RSS ends Nov 13: keep a feed of new subreddit posts

#reddit #rss #automation #webscraping

If you read a subreddit through its RSS link (https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/.rss), that feed stops on November 13, 2026. Reddit said so in its own r/modnews post on September 30: "we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives." Moderators are pointed to Devvit apps such as Discord Relay. For everyone else the same announcement says there is no replacement.

This post shows one way to keep getting new posts from a subreddit after that date, using a scheduled Apify Actor and any feed reader. It takes about ten minutes.

What changes

Three things matter for a feed user:

The .rss links for subreddits, searches and users stop working on November 13.
Reddit stops accepting new public API access requests on October 31, and access for unregistered apps starts closing on January 12, 2027.
Feed readers such as Inoreader or Feedly that pulled Reddit feeds will have nothing new to show from that day.

So the job to replace is simple: "give me each new post of this subreddit once, with title, link and date." The Reddit Scraper Actor can do that on a schedule, with no Reddit login or API key.

Step 1: turn your old feed link into input

The old link names the subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/new/.rss is the subreddit selfhosted, sorted by new. You can type the name or paste the whole old link into the subreddit field. A search feed maps to mode: search with searchQuery, and a user feed maps to mode: user with username.

Step 2: turn on onlyNew and name the watch

Open the Actor, paste this input and run it once:

{
  "mode": "subreddit",
  "subreddit": "selfhosted",
  "sort": "new",
  "maxPosts": 100,
  "onlyNew": true,
  "watchName": "selfhosted-feed",
  "includeComments": false,
  "outputFormat": "text"
}

The first run returns the newest posts and marks where the watch begins. Every later run with the same watchName returns only posts that no earlier run returned, oldest first. Two schedules on the same subreddit need different watch names.

Set maxPosts higher than the number of posts the subreddit gets between two runs. The run log warns when every post it read was new, which means some may have slipped past.

Step 3: schedule it hourly and read it as RSS

Click "Save as a new task" under the input. Then go to Console, Schedules, Create new, add the task and pick @hourly (or */15 * * * * for every 15 minutes).

Apify can serve a run's rows as RSS. Point your reader at the task's last successful run:

https://api.apify.com/v2/actor-tasks/<TASK_ID>/runs/last/dataset/items?format=rss&status=SUCCEEDED&token=<YOUR_TOKEN>

That link carries the token in plain text, so create a separate token limited to this task (Settings, API & Integrations, Create a new token, Limit token permissions) and never paste your main one. Each run holds only its own new posts, so let the reader check at least as often as the schedule runs. If you would rather be pushed than poll, the task's Integrations tab can send each successful run to Slack, email or a webhook.

What one row looks like

This is a real row from a run on October 29, 2026, with the long text cut short:

{
  "id": "1xilwa6",
  "title": "Self-hosting autonomous AI agents on bare metal: VRAM math, Ollama config, and z...",
  "author": "New_Difficulty566",
  "subreddit": "selfhosted",
  "score": 0,
  "num_comments": 5,
  "created_utc": "2026-10-29T14:42:42",
  "link": "https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1xilwa6/selfhosting_autonomous_ai_a...",
  "pubDate": "Thu, 29 Oct 2026 14:42:42 GMT",
  "content": "When moving self-hosted automations from single API calls to autonomous multi-st...",
  "content_format": "text"
}

link and pubDate are what a feed reader uses to open and date each entry. The row also carries the post text, score, comment count and flair if you want to filter downstream, for example in n8n.

What an hourly watch costs

Pricing is $0.003 per post returned plus a $0.00005 start event per run. An hourly watch is 720 runs a month. Runs with nothing new save no rows, so they cost only the start event: $0.036 a month for all 720. A subreddit with 300 new posts a month adds $0.90. That is about $0.94 a month before any account discounts. A busier subreddit costs more in proportion to its posts, and a quiet one costs close to nothing.

What it does not do

It returns public posts only. Private, quarantined and banned subreddits are not covered. It does not deliver new comments as a feed, only new posts. If you need the comment threads of a specific post, the same Actor can return them nested or as one row per comment, but that is a separate run.

If you moderate the community yourself, use the Devvit route Reddit recommends. This setup is for people who follow communities they do not run.

You can try it from the Reddit Scraper page on the Apify Store. The README there has the same three steps and a longer FAQ.

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