Mastodon per-user feed support

[jamietanna]

As discussed on #dev in chat, Granary right now can't support listing a server's posts in the outbox, so it'd be handy to have Bridgy Fed provide a means to filter down the feed to just a given user.

[snarfed]

Interesting! I'm a bit reluctant though. What I've found with granary and *-atom is that people often try to use them to follow lots of individual people on a given platform, often hundreds or thousands of accounts each, which turns them into large scale feed fetching platforms, which requires dedicated effort to scale that I'm not currently ready for.

I definitely get your use case of managing your per-person follows separately, to make sure you don't miss some of them! I don't know that I'm ready to support that use case broadly yet though.

[snarfed]

Oh! Looks like Mastodon actually serves these natively. They got accidently broken in 4.x, but that's been fixed, if maybe not released yet: mastodon/mastodon#20770

In the meantime, you can get a single user's feed by appending .rss to their profile URL, eg https://indieweb.social/@jamietanna.rss

[jamietanna]

Yes, that's a very fair reason to be reluctant to add this.

I'm considering that this could be implemented i.e. as https://fed.brid.gy/user/www.jvt.me/feed?user=https://todon.eu/@jalcine that'd just return Jacky's posts.

The RSS feeds don't include boosts, and have been pretty flakey from my experience

[StarrWulfe]

Could this just be as simple as adding a check for feeds already present (i.e. putting the .rss at the end or any other common formats) and check of it "sticks" and do a regex action in the background so that's the link we end up with anyway? Then BF doesn't need to serve anything since we're just using the feed already there and making it more convenient to grab?

[snarfed]

@StarrWulfe hmm maybe! I'm not sure adding BF would make discovering Mastodon's own feeds specifically any easier overall, but feel free to outline a concrete UX flow and we can see if we think it's better.

Notably, once they release mastodon/mastodon#20770, I think you'll be able to plug someone's Mastodon profile URL into your feed reader and it will Just Work, so I doubt we'll be able to improve on that.

[snarfed]

This ^ went out in Mastodon 4.1.0:

• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.1.0
• mastodon/mastodon@v4.0.4...v4.1.0

For example, https://todon.eu/@jalcine when fetched without rendering JS now includes this line:

<link href='https://todon.eu/@jalcine.rss' rel='alternate' type='application/rss+xml'>

and I've confirmed that you can plug https://todon.eu/@jalcine into an RSS reader and it works.

[jamietanna]

Ah nice, so that'll work with folks who publish all public stuff, but if there are limited visibility posts/accounts it may not work

[snarfed]

True! Same with Bridgy Fed's feeds though, it drops all non-public posts.

(And you're still right from earlier here that these feeds don't include boosts.)

[snarfed]

Moved this from Bridgy Fed to granary. Also realistically it would be Mastodon-only, since AP in practice doesn't have a way to ask an arbitrary instance for a given user's posts. (It could be outbox, but that's optional, and in practice very few servers implement it like this.)