It’s understandable if you’re a little burnt out on social media at the moment. I put off setting up a Bluesky account for years, mostly because I didn’t want yet another service to think about. At the same time, though, a lot of interesting people have shifted their posting to alternative sites like Bluesky account. The good news: you can follow users on either site without ever setting anything up.
That’s because every Bluesky and Mastodon account offers an RSS feed. This means you can use any of the best RSS readers to follow posts from any specific user. This is an ideal solution if you mostly want to keep up with the posts of a couple people. You could use this if there’s a writer whose articles and ideas you want to keep track of, for example.
The RSS feeds for both services aren’t exactly obvious. Here’s how to find them.
Finding the RSS feed for a Bluesky account is a matter of opening the profile page and adding /rss to the end of the URL in your browser. Hit Enter and the RSS feed will open—you can copy the URL and use it in any RSS reader.
Credit: Justin Pot
The resulting feed shows one “article” for every post. There won’t be a headline for the article—social media posts don’t have headlines—but the full content of the post is there.
A Bluesky account in NetNewsWire, an RSS reader for Mac.
Credit: Justin Pot
You can repeat this process for as many profiles as you like.
The RSS feed for Mastodon accounts work slightly differently. As before you need to head to the profile page for the profile you’re interested in. Then add .rss to the end of the URL in your browser. Hit Enter and the feed will open—you can copy the URL and use it in any RSS reader.
Credit: Justin Pot
Note that Mastodon gives users the option to disable the RSS feed, and that some instances disable RSS altogether. In my experience, though, most public profiles have the feature enabled.
The resulting feed, as with Bluesky, shows one “article” for every post with no headline.
A Mastodon account in NetNewsWire.
Credit: Justin Pot
You can repeat this process for as many profiles as you like.
I’m glad these features exist. They point to how both services are more committed to an open internet than Threads, which does not offer an RSS feed for profiles and only kinda sorta supports the open ActivityPub protocol.
