zkbro

Leaving Mastodon, embracing RSS

2025-01-04 21:33

I'm giving myself a break from Mastodon. I love reading contributions from people I'm following but when I go to interact I feel all icky. If I don't interact I feel like I didn't give them the praise they deserve. I feel eyes on me that aren't. I've also started to pay attention to "likes" or "favourites" on my own posts. The whole thing makes me feel gross. Why can't I contribute my comments with confidence I'm not being judged, or accept likes as a pat on the back, and nothing more??

Anyway, before I stopped viewing Mastodon (my account is still active.. I just need a break clearly), I went through each profile I follow and made sure they were in my RSS feed in some way, because I really do enjoy reading what they have to say. To my surprise, I found hadn't been following a few websites that folks had made, so I added them to my feed.

If someone didn't have a personal website, I followed their Mastodon RSS feed (everyone has one).

Sometimes I followed both their website and their Mastodon posts becuase they were vastly different.

My RSS feed has now blown out and is an absolutely pleasurable read with both fediverse and website posts.

This is a html of all the feeds and websites, with descriptions.

Or if you want the opml to import to your own reader, here it is, exported from my FreshRSS account, my preferred feed reader.

If you are using FreshRSS and you want to create a html from your exported opml file, this is the script I made:

#!/bin/bash

# Usage: convert_opml.sh [input_file]. Creates a feeds.html output file.

input_file="$1"

sed -i 's/      <outline text="/      <h3>/g' $input_file
sed -i 's/" type="rss" /<\/h3>/g' $input_file
sed -i 's/    <outline text="/    <h1>/g' $input_file
sed -i 's/">/<\/h1>/g' $input_file
sed -i '1c\<!DOCTYPE html>' $input_file
sed -i '2c\  <html lang="en">' $input_file
sed -i "4c\    <title>zkbro's opml</title>\n    <meta charset=\"UTF-8\">" $input_file
sed -i 's/xmlUrl/\n      <a href/g' $input_file
sed -i 's/ htmlUrl/>Feed<\/a><br>\n      <a href/g' $input_file
sed -i 's/ description="/>Website<\/a>\n      <div>/g' $input_file
sed -i 's/"\/>/<\/div>/g' $input_file
sed -i 's/\/opml/\/html/g' $input_file

mv $input_file feeds.html

I'm sure there's a better way, it's pretty ugly, but it worked. I refused ChatGPT for this one. Horrah for me.