Mastofeed

Ivory made me pleasant to use Mastodon in terms of the UX. But I had used Twitter mainly as a news provider, and I couldn't make a progress with it. I could add (@macrumors@mastodon.social) and 9to5Mac (@9to5Mac@mastodon.online) to my list, but still, I have only so many accounts to follow. I tried Facebook for the purpose but only learned that it was getting more and more intimidating me with growing 'Suggested' posts.

At that moment, my memory of the old RSS days came to my mind. I had used Google Reader to consolidate RSS news feeds, but Google buried it in a grave in 2013. My idea was to collect RSS feeds for my Mastodon account. I tried to make it by myself, but I learned that we already have one: Mastofeed.

It crawls RSS feeds and makes your account post them. It is important that the posts are published via your Mastodon account. I accidentally fired more than 100 toots from a newly added feed. Thanks to my mistake, I could learn that Mastodon has three levels of visibility control: Unlisted (private to me), Followers-Only, and Public - and you can set those visibilities per post.

The result was that I could have my well-curated news feed on Mastodon, but I'm not fully satisfied yet because I still have some glitches; I added more than 10 RSS feeds, but only four of them gave me any posts. Maybe, RSS is too old tech, and no one has maintained it recently, but we'll find a way, as always. In the meantime, I hope to see more media presence on Mastodon.