Posts tagged #mastodon

Announcing mastodon-homefeed-rss: your Mastodon home feed in your RSS reader

the Mastodon logo

tl;dr Want your Mastodon home feed in your RSS reader? I've cooked up just the thing.

I am enjoying Mastodon, the federated Twitter alternative, quite a bit. So far, my experience with it has been extremely pleasant, and reminiscent of the internet of the early 2000s, which was far more decentralized, and far more neighborly.

However! Speaking of the internet of the 2000s, I am one of those people who still misses Google Reader, and still uses an RSS reader. There are 154 feeds in my reader currently, including one for my Twitter home feed (provided by a third party), another for Facebook (ditto), and another for Instagram (ditto). Because this is the twenty first century, dammit, and I should not have to go gallivanting all around the goddam web to find out what's going on! This is why RSS readers got invented, and why they still rock. Anyone who tells you RSS is dead simply stopped using it (or never did).

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1980s Nostalgia Break: Fred Rated for Federated

Amid the ongoing Twitter meltdown, I’ve been enjoying Mastodon quite a bit. (I’m on sfba.social.) Every time I see “Federated” over in its sidebar, I think of the bonkers commercials from the 1980s for electronics chain store The Federated Group, with the amazing Shadoe Stevens playing Dr. Fred Rated. These commercials transport me back to a time when a Quasar VHS VCR for $273.11 was an exciting deal. Here, enjoy a few minutes of pure eighties insanity…