TL;DR: just add “.rss” to a mastodon profile or tags or user-tags to get an RSS stream! My photography profile @hikingdude@mastodon.social for example can easily be followed by an RSS Reader by following https://mastodon.social/@hikingdude.rss.
No account required! And that’s not even the end! 🤯
What is RSS and do I need the tech stuff?
If you don’t know what RSS is, maybe have a brief look at Wikipedia. You can dive as deep as you want. Letting describe Bing copilot why RSS is useful gives a quite good short description:
RSS is a fantastic tool for non-technical users because it simplifies content consumption. Imagine having a personalized news feed that automatically delivers fresh articles, blog posts, and podcasts from your favorite websites directly to you. No need to visit each site manually! With RSS, you stay updated efficiently, customize your content, and avoid email clutter.But you don’t have to deal with technical details, just use an RSS app on your phone or computer and you’re ready to go. It’s like a podcast app – just for news and texts. I personally recommend Feedly, both on the desktop and on the phone. It’s free and good.
Back to the topic: Some Background thoughts
Just recently I got aware of the fact that you can simply follow a Mastodon profile even without having to have an own Mastodon account! Simply by adding “.rss” to the profile URL. WTF?!
After thinking about it I was shocked that – after decades of classical social media (Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) – I was totally used to the thought that I need an account on the according platform to be able to follow somebody.
I even remember that in the early days, Facebook HAD an RSS stream feature. Which has been discontinued long ago. Of course, from the perspective of a platform owner, an RSS stream is no good – you have less lock-in to your platform, you don’t force users to have an account and log in. And in effect the platform has no control of “curating” a personalized stream, less pageviews, less ads – less control. There’s just no benefit for the owner of such a platform!
What have we done?
But – wasn’t the word-wide-web designed to be a … web? Where links connect sites & information? I’m sad to say: The big players have succeeded to destroy a part of this ideology by creating walled platforms. And we happlily followed. 😭
That’s sad! Really sad! But not all is lost.
Is it just about Profiles and Mastodon?
As I just got to know, the feature is not just limited to Mastodon profiles but also to
- profiles & replies https://mastodon.social/@hikingdude/with_replies.rss
- to my posts with only specific tags: https://mastodon.social/@hikingdude/tagged/hiking.rss
- or to tags of a specific instance: https://mastodon.social/tags/hiking.rss
And probably some more that I am note aware of!
And as Alan Grant pointed out:
Some other Fediverse platforms also, although not necessarily with the same extension. I know that for Pixelfed you can add “.atom” to the profile url.
Alan Grant
And just as I read it, it’s not just Pixelfed, in Peertube, RSS or ATOM support is there as well. Don’t get confused, RSS and ATOM are technically different, but RSS readers usually support both – don’t hazzly with the techy-details!
Final thoughts
The more I get into the Mastodon / Fediverse technology, the more I like the idea / ideology behind it. And the more I get aware how much control we gave away to only a handful of companies that decide what we should consume.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily for the bad – All the classical social media has it’s good sides, and also the monetary aspect – this is what we have seen in the past decades. But I do think that it can’t be great if these few players dominate the market.
I’m pretty confident, that Mastodon and the other Fediverse projects (Peertube, Pixelfed, ..) won’t radically change the market. Just alone because of the big players spending quite some marketing budget for their platforms. But it’s great to see some viable alternatives.