How I Use RSS Feed for Bluesky and Mastodon
It’s understandable if you’re a little burnt out on social media right now. I put off creating a Bluesky account for years, mainly because I didn’t want to think about yet another service. However, at the same time, many interesting people have moved their posts to alternative sites such as the Bluesky account. The good news is that you can track users on any website without having to configure anything.
This is because every Bluesky and Mastodon account offers an RSS feed. This means that you can use any of the best RSS readers to follow any specific user’s posts. This is ideal if you mainly want to follow a few people’s posts. You can use this, for example, if there is a writer whose articles and ideas you want to track.
The RSS feeds for both services are not entirely obvious. Here’s how to find them.
Find the RSS feed for any Bluesky account
To find the RSS feed for your Bluesky account, simply open your profile page and add /rss to the end of the URL in your browser. Press Enter and the RSS feed will open – you can copy the URL and use it in any RSS reader.
The resulting feed displays one “article” for each post. The article will not have a title—social media posts do not have titles—but the full content of the post will.
You can repeat this process for as many profiles as you like.
Find the RSS feed for any Bluesky account Mastodon account
The RSS feed for Mastodon accounts works a little differently. As before, you need to go to the profile page of the profile you are interested in. Then add .rss to the end of the URL in the browser. Press Enter and the feed will open – you can copy the URL and use it in any RSS reader.
Please note that Mastodon gives users the option to disable the RSS feed, and in some cases, disables RSS altogether. However, in my experience, most public profiles have this feature enabled.
The resulting feed, as with Bluesky, displays one “article” for each message without a title.
You can repeat this process for as many profiles as you like.
I’m glad these features exist. They point out that both services are more committed to the open web than Threads, which doesn’t offer an RSS feed for profiles and only somewhat supports the open ActivityPub protocol.