The Mastodon network, part of the larger Fediverse, has its own challenges when it comes to curating content and information monitoring. There isn’t a centralized location to search as there is for Twitter. Instead there are literally tens of the thousands scattered across the world.
On the other hand, Mastodon has two big advantages over Twitter: 1) It’s open and offers RSS feeds of instance hashtags. 2) Mastodon has a strong hashtag culture and resources are often well-tagged, making them easier to find than on Twitter, when such thorough tagging is infrequent.
I’m still experimenting on what to do with RSS feeds from Mastodon, but in order to experiment I need actual feeds, so I put together this VERY basic hashtag-based RSS feed generator for seven popular instances:
– Mastodon.online
– Mastodon.cloud
– Mastodon.social
– Mastodon.lol
– C.im
– Mastodon.world
– Mastodonapp.uk
How it Works
1. Enter a hashtag (do not use #). Remember it’s a hashtag, so it’s one string.
2. Click the button.
Resstodon will generate an OPML file, which is just a specially-formatted text file, and deposit it wherever your downloaded files go. An OPML file can be imported into an RSS feeder, allowing you to add seven RSS feeds to your reader in a few clicks. I tested importing it into Feedly, and I found it would sometimes not completely import all the feeds, but if I tried re-importing it, it would finish importing completely (without duplicating the feeds I had already successfully imported.)
