Discovering via social media without being on social media

2025-02-13 20:57

TLDR: I created a script that converts fediverse starter packs into OPML files to import into your RSS reader - A way to discover via social media without being on social media.

I'm on a little hiatus from Mastodon at the moment, not because I get overwhelmed/sad/angry/offended with posts of certain types (my follow list is small so I don't really get that bad news stuff), but because I get anxiety around the social part of it - the actual whole point of social media?

Because I am away from it all I am missing a whole lot of discovery via the folk in my follow list, hashtag searching, boosts, random rabbit holes and whatnot.

There are a couple of ways I can follow along without the anxiety of participation, reading comfortably in my RSS reader:

• Following users accounts by applying .rss to any user's instance address and you can add it to an RSS reader. I do this with some of the folks I was already following.

• Follow hastags (like #SmallWeb via the mastodon.social instance: https://mastodon.social/tags/smallweb.rss) - Replace smallweb with any other tag or mastodon.social with any other instance and you've got yourself another feed of short posts, that may or may not link to blogs/articles/webpages, or open the thread itself to follow the conversation (you don't need an account).

But this afternoon I remembered about fediverse "Starter Packs" - popular on Bluesky I think - designed to bundle a bunch of users into themes so you can follow them all or pick and choose according to your interests.

Looks like you need a Bluesky account to view their lists of starter packs, but I found FEDIDEVS Mastodon Starter Pack website which has a nice search engine and lists each pack out with every user's link and all.

So I created starter-pack-to-opml, a python script, that pulls any given pack and converts it into an OPML to import into most RSS feed readers. Here are some of the packs I was able to follow with the generated OPML:

• IndieWeb Folks | OPML
• IndieSec | OPML
• Linux Enthusiasts | OPML
• Mountain Enthusiasts | OPML

I imported via "Dynamic OPML" in my FreshRSS reader and gave them their own categories. Unfortunately FreshRSS can't hide whole categories from the main feed in bulk, so if I want to declutter my main feed I need to do each account manually.

I used ChatGPT to help make the script. It only took 3 prompts and a bit of tweaking. There are some minor issues.

Happy with that wee tinker today.