Reddit's login wall is now the default path for a lot of readers. I read public threads for research, and I didn't want another account just to open a link. The official API can do the job, but it means OAuth, an app registration, and a token refresh path before the first request.

The public RSS feeds are still there. No key, no OAuth, Atom XML. I built a small Android client around them (105 KB, no server, no analytics). This post is about the feed format, the parsing problems, and the limits that decide what kind of reader you can build.

The endpoints

Listing: https://www.reddit.com/r/{subreddit}/hot.rss?limit=25 https://www.reddit.com/r/{subreddit}/new.rss?limit=25 https://www.reddit.com/r/{subreddit}/top.rss?limit=25

Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/{subreddit}/comments/{post_id}/.rss?limit=100

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{subreddit} is the name without r/ . hot , new , and top are the listing sorts.…