The more I learn about Mastodon, the more impressed I am. It's a very nicely done piece of software. And unlike Twitter, they have RSS feeds for every user. Just add a .rss to the end of the URL and you get a nice feed, like this. When I look at the feed I see something someone put some love into. Or if it was a team, they worked well as a team. #
I do have a couple of suggestions to make, based on experience providing these feeds basically in all the software I do. #
Please give the user a way to change the channel-level title and description for the feed. The reason — my feed doesn’t say it’s from my Mastodon account, so when an update shows up in FeedLand it’s missing that context. The user has a better idea of the context for the feed, how many other feeds they have and how this one relates to those feeds. #
There also is a simple instant notification protocol in RSS 2.0 called rssCloud. I’d be happy to show you how to turn it on. Would increase immediacy of updates.#
There’s a simple way to link the feed to an account on Twitter, Facebook, etc. we should add one for Masto as well. I started a thread for this. #
I've started a discussion thread for this topic here. I'd love to work with the people who do this part of Mastodon to make this feature even better than it already is.#
PS: Here's what my Mastodon feed looks like as a river in FeedLand and as a mailbox. #
Last update: Thursday November 17, 2022; 9:26 AM EST.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)