The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Earlier this year, someone mentioned Mastofeed. Then I found there are two kinds of Mastofeeds. Both have their own domain and their own repository. Both are free, so I wonder what their business models are as something or somebody needs to be the product. Both have to do with feeds and the ActivityPub protocol of the Fediverse (which mainly consists of Mastodon servers, but other types of servers are still growing). Both can be self-hosted. Both their directions and audience differs.

In short:

• mastofeed.org (mentioned to me first) is uses RSS as feed and posts entries to the Fediverse
• mastofeed.com (found later) uses Fediverse as feed and exposes entries as an HTML iframe using an HTTP API

Some more links:

Mastofeed.org

Runs in the EU since 2022. Signing up requires write access to your ActivityPub feed.

• [Wayback/Archive] MastoFeed – Send your RSS Feeds to Mastodon
  

  If you sign up with MastoFeed to your Mastodon server, said server will grant MastoFeed a private key for MastoFeed to post on your account. This uses the OAuth 2.0 Protocol.

  MastoFeed only asks for the following permissions: Read-only access to your account (to get your username), write-only access to your posts (to send public messages on behalf of your account), and write-only access for media attachments (to include pictures in the messages if necessary).

  • [Wayback/Archive] MastoFeed – Send your RSS Feeds to Mastodon
• [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – kergozh/mastofeed · GitHub
• [Wayback/Archive] Mastofeed (@mastofeed@mastodon.social) – Mastodon
  

  MastoFeed is the easiest way to automate sending your RSS Feeds to your Mastodon account.

• [Wayback/Archive] MastoFeed – Send Your RSS Feeds to Mastodon | Hacker News
• [Wayback/Archive] A few cool things I recently discovered about RSS feeds. Spoiler — they have super-powers. | by Vladimir Campos | Medium
• [Wayback/Archive] Setting up MastoFeed | DeepakNess

Personally, I don’t need this as WordPress solved it by posting it to both @wiert@mastodon.social and @wiert.me@wiert.me

Mastofdeed.com

On-line since 2018; seems hosted in the USA.

• [Wayback/Archive] Mastofeed – embeddable Mastodon feeds
  

  Embedded Mastodon feeds for blogs etc.

  New! Want to opt out of your posts showing up? Add #nobot or #noMastofeed to your profile and it won’t be shown.
  You can also override your existing #nobot tag for mastofeed specifically by adding #mastofeed

• [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – fenwick67/mastofeed: ActivityPub feed => iframe embed. https://www.mastofeed.com · GitHub
• [Wayback/Archive] Mastodon Timeline Embed (Mastofeed Example)

Via / queries / further reading

1. [Wayback/Archive] Christine Lemmer-Webber: “If you wanted to make high-imp…” – social.coop
   

   Christine Lemmer-Webber@cwebber@social.coop

   If you wanted to make high-impact fediverse software, I would recommend making a simple daemon that does the following:

   – Consumes RSS/Atom feeds
   – Posts them as subscribable feeds over activitypub
   – So dead easy you can host it yourself as a simple daemon on your server
   – Optionally: collects replies as a comment section with a way to render them inline, a-la disqus, with some simple moderation tools. Simplest way to reduce spam would be to make it approve-only to show up on the feed.

   You could extend this to allow posting on other servers etc. But, in other words, let more people use the static site generator they already have

2. [Wayback/Archive] Fairness4All: “@cwebber I haven’t audited the…” – Mastodon
   

   Fairness4All@closeted_unionist@mastodon.social

   @cwebber I haven’t audited the source code yet but I’ve seen some accounts using mastofeed

   https://mastofeed.org/ https://github.com/kergozh/mastofeed

3. [Wayback/Archive] Post by Christine Lemmer-Webber | Social GL-Como
   

   Elena “of Valhalla”

    in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber • 17 hours ago • 

   @Christine Lemmer-Webber I’m using friendica which does more or less that (among a thousand other features, of course), and I can confirm it’s something that would be really useful

   especially if it was something easy to package for distributions, and thus easy to run in a sensible and low effort way

The idea here is to actually combine mastofeed.org, mastofeed.com and extend bits of the the masto-feed below. Interesting concept!

Queries

• [Wayback/Archive] mastofeed at DuckDuckGo
• [Wayback/Archive] friendica at DuckDuckGo

Further reading

• There is masto-feed which still became unmaintained in its infancy, see
  • [Wayback/Archive] Masto-Feed: A personal RSS reader as a Mastodon account companion | Xavier.Arnaus.net
  • [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – XaviArnaus/masto-feed: RSS feed reader that posts updates in Mastodon API · GitHub
  • [Wayback/Archive] Feeder (@feeder@social.arnaus.net) – Arnaus goes social

  It is a pity though, as it is an interesting concept: it can communicate two ways so in addition to publishing over ActivityPub, it can also respond to ActivityPub messages for status and updates. In a sense it reminds me of the old BITNET Relay, LISTSERV and TRICKLE days.

• A vibe coded alternative:
  • [Wayback/Archive] Building a standalone RSS-to-Mastodon bridge – D’Arcy Norman, PhD
  • [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – dlnorman/standalone-rss-mastodon-bridge: A standalone Fediverse integration app intended for static websites like mine, which is generated by Hugo. · GitHub
• Friendica might do what all the above already does:
  • [Wayback/Archive] friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
  • [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – friendica/friendica: Friendica Communications Platform · GitHub

--jeroen