It’s understandable if you’re a little burnt out on social media right now. I put off setting up a Bluesky account for years, mostly because I didn’t want to have to think about another service. However, at the same time, many interesting people have moved their posts to alternative sites like Bluesky Account. The good news: You can follow users on both sites without ever having to set anything up.
That’s because every Bluesky and Mastodon account offers an RSS feed. This means you can use any of them the best RSS readers to follow posts from a specific user. This is an ideal solution if you mainly want to stay informed about the posts of a few people. For example, you can use this if you have an author whose articles and ideas you want to keep track of.
The RSS feeds for both services aren’t exactly obvious. Here’s how to find them.
To find the RSS feed for a Bluesky account, all you have to do is open the profile page and add it /rss at the end of the URL in your browser. Blow Input and the RSS feed will open – you can copy the URL and use it in any RSS reader.
Photo credit: Justin Pot
The resulting feed shows an “article” for each post. There will be no headline for the article – social media posts don’t have headlines – but the full content of the post is there.
A Bluesky account with NetNewsWire, an RSS reader for Mac.
Photo credit: Justin Pot
You can repeat this process for as many profiles as you want.
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 it .rss at the end of the URL in your browser. Blow Input and the feed will open – you can copy the URL and use it in any RSS reader.
Photo credit: Justin Pot
Note that Mastodon offers users the option to disable the RSS feed and some instances disable RSS completely. However, in my experience, most public profiles have this feature enabled.
As with Bluesky, the resulting feed shows an “article” without a heading for each post.
A Mastodon account with NetNewsWire.
Photo credit: Justin Pot
You can repeat this process for as many profiles as you want.
I’m glad these features exist. They point out that both services are more committed to an open Internet than Threads, which does not offer an RSS feed for profiles and only somewhat supports the open ActivityPub protocol.
