Want to follow #twitter users with a fairly nice RSS feed?
Want to mix in #mastodon users too?
Fed up with #RSS feeds which don't include a preview of the links they mention?
All these things can be fixed if you just fuzz with the feeds enough.
If you have a server running PHP/Apache then you can install this little bit of software I wrote and it'll do all those things.
I call it #Fudz, cuz it fuzzes with feeds.
https://github.com/revpriest/fudz
EG: Fetching an RSS of my twitter account:
https://dalliance.net/fudz/twitteru/revpriest
Or if you wanted a nicer RSS of my Mastodon account than Mastodon provides by default:
https://dalliance.net/fudz/mastou/boing.world/pre
Or if you wanted to just add previews to links on some RSS feed?
Well, the normal Mastodon RSS feed for my account is at: https://boing.world/@pre.rss
Stupid thing doesn't include preview boxes of the first link. But this does:
https://dalliance.net/fudz/feed/https/boing.world/@pre.rss
It's locked down and will only serve those three links to your IP. My RSS reader is whitelisted for others.
Install it yourself on your own server if you want to actually use it.
I intend to continue to fuzz with feeds when they are annoying, and add things as I need them, but to do it slackfully when I can be arsed.
I finally made it able to have an IP-whitelist and a path-whitelist a while back so it's safe to publish now without any risk of anyone overloading my cache space.
I am using it primarily for Twitter at the moment, and my god it's better having these things in a well designed reader instead of letting the algorithm dictate what you read based on corporate interests.
I'm using #ttrss as my reader with rules to sort feeds into Skim/Follow/Stalk with sub-trees of a couple of categories.
Often just marking whole tranches of "skim" things as read without reading them.
Making sure I read every post from everyone in my Stalk list, even those that are replies to people I never heard of.
Automatically marking read replies to people I never heard of for people in the Follow list.
Similar stalk/follow/skim structure for the longer-form RSS feeds that mostly ain't twitter.
When one guy I followed was kicked off of Twitter, I just edited his feed to point at an RSS of his Telegram and it's like he was never cancelled.
You can't let the corporate-controlled algorithms control what you see my friends. You gotta take control yourself somehow.
Even if that means learning to use an RSS reader.
If you don't learn how to use your software, your software will learn how to use you.