Turning popular links from your Mastodon timeline into an RSS feed
Ever since a certain someone bought Twitter, I’ve been quite invested into using the Fediverse as my main social web efforts. My Mastodon timeline does a good job for short-form text updates. And Pixelfed is a great nascent Instagram-replacement.
One thing I particularly enjoy about both of them is the fact that they bring back the simple, chronological timeline. Having an actual timeline (to me) makes it a lot easier to orient oneself and understand the temporal context of posts. For example, it’s easy to jump back and forth between time, instead of having disconnected posts.
Of course, a strictly chronological timeline comes with one drawback: It’s extremely hard to catch up with everything that happened, as there’s no “What you missed” feature. Which already bugged me back in the early days of my own Twitter use in ~2011, when it in turn was purely based on chronological order. In those days, I had already made a bad attempt of aggregating the most popular links posted to Twitter, in order to be able to see what external things people found worthy to share. Between API changes and life, I abandoned that at some point.
I thought it would be nice to resurrect that idea for my own Mastodon use though: What if I could follow up with the links that were most often posted into my own Mastodon timeline, by having them aggregated into an RSS feed? And then I stumbled over Adam Hill’s fediview, which is similar in that it aggregates the most popular posts instead, and digests them to an email.
