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Every Mastodon user has an RSS feed
- mrzool 3y agoIn other news, the blog of the RSS Advisory Board, inactive since 2014, started getting updates again :) It was a pleasant surprise seeing new articles from them pop up in my feed reader again after such a long time.
- ttepasse 3y agoPossibly a result of the recent kerfuffle about the attribution of the spec: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377953
- bhouston 3y agoI noticed recently that I get more engagement on Mastodon than Twitter. It shifted in the last couple months as I have been posting to both the same content.
- Havoc 3y agoIs the quality of the engagement better?
- realitythreek 3y agoThat’s a pretty low bar, the comparison is to Twitter.
- bhouston 3y agoIt isn’t worse on Mastodon. I am not sure it is objectively better.
- lmedinas 3y agoi think so because on Twitter you can always get some randomness due to the algorithm and someone might reply if your Tweet appeared on the "For You" tab. On Mastodon this "randomness" has way less probablity to happen unless you use hashtags and someone finds the Toot through the hashtag. Quality of interactions apart, the randomness of Twitter is one of the things i miss on Mastodon.
- vidarh 3y agoSimilar, but I think that is natural at this point. My main account has 100x as many followers on Twitter, but accumulated over many years, and I suspect a fairly substantial number are bots and/or accounts that are now rarely in use, combined with the algo pushing a culture of just following huge numbers of people which may never surface for you in the feed anyway. If we trust the view counts on Twitter, the average tweet gets seen by just a tiny fraction of my followers. On Mastodon, meanwhile, a very substantial proportion of my followers actively engage, and about half has shown "signs of life" (post, like, boost) in the last week or so. That said, this will change as accounts age and slowly get abandoned there too, so it will take a long time before we see if there's a qualitative difference.
- JdeBP 3y agoI've seen several make the same observation, after testing, over the past six or so months.
- superkuh 3y agoAnd it's a good thing too since post version 3 mastadon instances do not serve HTML text or images. It's all just a javascript application. The RSS feed is the only way to actually access the text of posts without executing an arbitrary application. It'd be nice if there was a "nitter" for twitter but for mastadon(s).
- kstrauser 3y agoModern web browsers are JavaScript engines that also render stuff. I understood the resistance to running JavaScript 20 years ago, but today, I rank that up there with buying a cell phone but refusing to run 3rd-party apps. The web is JavaScript now.
- Andrex 3y agoI have JavaScript disabled by default and enable it on my bookmarks and when necessary on random new websites I visit. I have no problem turning on JS for a web app. I understand Google Maps just couldn't really work how it's expected to without JS. Same for web email clients, or games, or office suits. But if your "app" is just a progressively-enhanced list of posts (e.g., a blog), there is no justification for forced JS usage. Sorry Mastodon. Running JS is a privilege for those with the computing power (or battery capacity) to spare, and turns the browser into the biggest risk vector on whatever machine that browser is installed on.
- vram22 3y agoOr requiring it just to render images. Actually seen some sites that work that way. And these were simple company pages or personal portfolio sites, so no reason why the images could not be static(ally served).
- JdeBP 3y agoThe part of the WWW that I write and control has zero JavaScript. You tar everyone with a single brush highly erroneously.
- berkes 3y ago
- veave 3y agoEvery twitter user also has an rss feed... https://nitter.net/twitter/rss https://nitter.net/twitter/rss
- mrzool 3y agoI was so happy to see that Nitter kept working after they killed the API. Now I use their RSS feeds to keep up with my favorite accounts since I’m not on Twitter that much anymore.
- veave 3y agoThey did? I still use the API 1.1 and it works fine for retrieving timelines and posting which is all I need to do.
- rcarmo 3y agoLists don’t, though. It is easy enough to get that going if you use the API (which I did, obviously), and feels like something the platform could easily add. (I consume a couple of my lists almost exclusively via RSS, and the result is a bit like following a couple of curated news sites)
- AndroidKitKat 3y agoDoes not seem to be the case for users on instances that use Akkoma or Pleroma, and probably other non-mastodon frontends. E.g. https://social.kernel.org/torvalds.rss https://social.kernel.org/torvalds.rss
- v64 3y agoThe URLs are a bit different with those systems. https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds.rss https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds.rss works (and redirects to https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds/feed.atom https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds/feed.atom).
- AndroidKitKat 3y agoThanks for pointing this out to me, I'm sure I'm not the only one who didn't know this. I recently wanted to import my own Akkoma RSS feed into my website, and I tried searching around the Akkoma documentation and didn't see any mentions of feeds.
- kevincox 3y agoYour URL is slightly off. If your feed reader supports auto-discovery (most do) you can just paste in https://social.kernel.org/torvalds https://social.kernel.org/torvalds (the HTML UI) and it will find the feed for you.
- kibwen 3y agoNote that every subreddit and every Youtube channel is also an RSS feed. I have to imagine that some rogue engineeers snuck that functionality in over a decade ago and that it's simply escaped the notice of any PMs or bean counters since then.
- littlestymaar 3y agoShh! Don't tell them!
- politelemon 3y agoVery interesting to learn this, and sad to know at the same time that it could probably rot and degrade over time. I wonder if YouTube clients like newpipe use those RSS feeds.
- bookofjoe 3y agoThank you SO MUCH for pointing this out: I never knew about YouTube being a feed. I will make a YouTube video demonstrating this so those who use RSS readers will be able to monitor my channel.
- dec0dedab0de 3y agoWhen youtube and reddit started almost every website had an rss feed, so I doubt anyone had to sneak it in.
- the-printer 3y agoAh, but the parent comment does so much to fuel the narrative of conflict that makes places like the Fediverse so appealing to some.
- jachee 3y agoAnd you’re merely fueling the narrative of “everything is simply fueling someone’s narrative.”
- Zambyte 3y ago
- kagevf 3y agoSo does every HN user https://hnrss.github.io/#user-feeds https://hnrss.github.io/#user-feeds Edit: it’s 3rd party, though . . .
- remram 3y agoThat's third-party.
- the-printer 3y agoNot sure why this is getting downvoted because this is the best way to browse HN in my opinion.
- palata 3y agoI didn't know about this, it's great!
- aendruk 3y agoRemember when this was a standard feature of social websites? If you want to read a person's updates without signing up for Twitter, or without visiting the site, just use the rss feed to subscribe. If your page is public, any one with a feed reader can subscribe to your feed and see your latest updates in their feed reader, even if they don't have a Twitter account. The feed contains the information you see on the page, but in a special format for easy aggregation. (2011) https://web.archive.org/web/20110228080118/http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/107-my-profile-account-settings/articles/15361-how-to-find-your-rss-feed https://web.archive.org/web/20110228080118/http://support.tw... A news aggregator is the best way to keep track of all the feeds you care about. Facebook will generate an RSS Feed that you can save to your bookmarks folder and view in your browser. You will now have an auto-updating RSS Feed that alerts you of important things on Facebook involving your account. (2008) https://web.archive.org/web/20080908073106/http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=23 https://web.archive.org/web/20080908073106/http://www.facebo...
- mrzool 3y agoThat would be unthinkable now. Crazy how things have changed.
- EGreg 3y agoWhy unthinkable ??
- acidburnNSA 3y agoBecause all major actors are laser-focused on extracting more revenue with ads and subscriptions rather than improving connectivity and freedom.
- gfosco 3y agoConnectivity and freedom don't pay salaries or cloud bills, unfortunately. Any rational actor has to focus on maintaining profitability.
- joshu 3y agoi don’t think rss comes close to scaling. every single subscriber will poll every single thing every 30 minutes (or whatever). this was a crushing amount of traffic 20 years ago when the web was much, much smaller…
- gmu3 3y agoEvery single reader app not every subscriber and not everyone hosts their own reader.
- lapcat 3y ago> i don’t think rss comes close to scaling. every single subscriber will poll every single thing every 30 minutes (or whatever). Well-behaved RSS clients send a conditional request and in most cases receive an HTTP 304 Not Modified response. > this was a crushing amount of traffic 20 years ago when the web was much, much smaller… It was?
- rambambram 3y agoThat's why I chose to do manual polling/clicking for the built-in reader I have for HeyHomepage.com Just a list of all subscribed feeds that one can click through. My reasoning was that since a subscriber actively and knowingly subscribed to something interesting, they might gonna click it again when they're interested again. No need to automatically poll everything all the time. Maybe for a future newsletter/magazine function I need to do some automatic polling in the background.
- winrid 3y agoYou can also create an RSS feed from your FastComments account! https://blog.fastcomments.com/(7-08-2020)-create-an-rss-feed-from-your-comments.html https://blog.fastcomments.com/(7-08-2020)-create-an-rss-feed... Just a little feature I added because I know some people love RSS.
- HuhWhatMeansYou 3y ago[dead]
- alwillis 3y agoFollow a hashtag on Mastodon also creates an RSS feed you can subscribe to. For example, if you're on mastodon.social and follow the #a11y hashtag, you can subscribe to mastodon.social/tags/a11y.rss Very handy.
- RobotToaster 3y agopleroma also has gopher support.
- nathants 3y agoevery github branch has an rss feed too!
- sssilver 3y agoSpeaking of owning your content, I’ve been looking for a blogging solution that would: - Be statically generated - Be self-hosted - Have a fantastic iOS app - Make authoring posts containing media effortless And nothing that I find comes even close. Can someone just build this?
- qudat 3y agoHugo and that class of static sites are what I would recommend. If you want something just as simple and is a small service you could try https://prose.sh https://prose.sh No “lock-in” since you control the source files and is compatible with Hugo
- sssilver 3y agoHow is Hugo photo publishing effortless? Also what is the Hugo iOS experience?
- lmedinas 3y agoWell if you have the build automated, you can simply use a markdown editor and commit the file into git. It's not like an experience like Wordpress but i would say it's not that bad.
- qudat 3y agoAll I do is put photos inside my Hugo blog folder and then reference it in my markdown files. I’m not sure how it could be simpler than that. I also don’t understand why someone would want an iOS app for a blog. What’s the use case?
- earthboundkid 3y agoThis is WordPress, except for the static part.
- sssilver 3y agoYeah well I really don’t wanna maintain or pay someone else to maintain a persistence layer, when I already have an iPhone and pay for iCloud subscription.
- anotherevan 3y agoIt's a shame there is no RSS feed for your home timeline.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThat would require authentication or a keyed RSS feed. This isn't impossible, but it takes some careful consideration and is a possible security issue. Reddit offers this for some account feeds, using obfuscated, but not authenticated, feeds. If someone gets ahold of the feed URL, however, they have access to private account data. For Mastodon, a preferred option might be to use a terminal-based / commandline Mastodon client, of which there are several.
- anotherevan 3y agoFrom my preliminary investigation of Lemmy, it does seem to have RSS feeds for communities, but could not find them for individual posts - which is a bit of a shame.
- kazinator 3y agoMastodon instances have RSS feeds where each item links to it original location on its original instance, not the instance where you got the feed. This is useless for engagement, because you have to jump through hoops to reply to a post. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74579163/how-to-resolve-mastodon-toot-urls-appearing-in-rss-to-a-specific-instance https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74579163/how-to-resolve-... https://github.com/Riduidel/mastodon-rss/issues/7 https://github.com/Riduidel/mastodon-rss/issues/7 The issue states that there isn't an API for it. What isn't needed is an API to resolve a foreign toot to the local one, but for the Mastodon instance to make available the local feeds in RSS form in the first place. There is no logical reason that you can see local toots on some hashtag topics in the web UI, or an app, but not in RSS.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoI use mine [0] to post Mastodon to Twitter via IFTTT\ [0] https://amazingcto.social/ https://amazingcto.social/
- zimpenfish 3y agoAnnoyingly, gotosocial appears to gate off RSS behind `enable_rss` in the database accessible only by an (undocumented) extension to the `update_credentials` API call. Tch. That could do with being exposed to the command line account mangler.