Optimal Mastodon Tools

I believe understanding this technical setup is best assisted by understanding how I see the design of the Mastodon network. Those ideas are covered in a previous post

I Don’t Like Mastodon’s River; Introducing Newsraft

Since Mastodon federates micro-blog posts from across the universe of collaborating nodes, I think the ideal interface for subscribed-to Mastodon content is a big “inbox” that’s created when some code pulls your messages from all those nodes to your computer. Then, the code should help you swiftly tear through your unread content: mark important, mark read, mark all read, peek at an image, etc.

I think it should look something like this:

The “infinite scroll” interface of Facebook or Twitter was designed to keep punters suckers users insecure so that they came back often like a cocaine-addicted lab rat tapping a button for another pellet. Despite the cognitive and productivity flaws this design brings about, those sites' ubiquity has coached many to believe “this is what social networking as to feel like,” and Mastodon has emulated it, warts and all.

But this interface fails to show off what can be so glorious about Mastodon: you can get done with “doing social networking” on Mastodon without fear of missing out. Content lands in a bucket and you can peruse it or mark it read or important on your schedule. The software that lets me have such a calm, cool experience is Newsraft.

The software I wanted is:

1. Text-based, therefore fast, like my beloved tin news reader from yesteryear

   

2. Flexible: let me organize, but also give me a single virtual inbox through which I can traverse quickly, like my beloved mutt mail reader from yesteryear
3. Maintainable by Unix tools – I don’t want to have to log into something, I want to run it as an application on my computer

Solution: Newsraft + RSS feeds of my followed content

Fact 1: Mastodon automatically publishes every user’s posts as an RSS feed

I didn’t know about this, but my “node-mate” @linuxgal@techhub.social clued me in. All Mastodon users’ posts by default are published to an RSS feed. RSS is a simple and well-understood technology for publishing updates. RSS makes many news tickers or regularly updated media releases (e.g. podcasts) on the internet work.

Thus for any Mastodon person, you can get an RSS feed of their content at https://<home-node/@<id>. For someone on another server you simply take their ID of @someid@someOther.server and turn it into https://someOther.server/@someid. In fact, in the Appendix code sample I provide below, I’ve written that exact logic in JavaScript.

It’s important to note that an RSS feed is meant to be read by a machine. Humans would find the feed’s text dull and confusing. So an RSS reader takes the machine-friendly information and makes it friendly to the human eye. Some applications might go for a full native application experience, some others might go for a more-minimal, text-oriented approach. I prefer the latter.

Armed with a list of RSS publication URLs, all you need is an RSS reader to process these machine-friendly feeds of Mastodon friends’ posts into something humans can process.

Newsraft is just such an application.

Fact 2: Newsraft is a text-based console RSS reader program

newsraft is built explicitly to honor the design of the console-based mutt mail reader.(goal 1, ✅) Longtime readers of the site will know that I ❤️ mutt (1, 2, 3, 4).

Additionally, from a programming perspective, it’s designed to be small with a minimum of outside dependencies. It’s just a plain old C program that’s been carefully written and which adheres to the Unix model of simplicity and configuration by text files.

As a result, all one has to do is take the aforementioned list of RSS feeds, put it in a file called $HOME/.newsraft/feeds and violà, Newsraft is ready to start presenting your feeds instead of forcing you to rely on a web application.

Newsraft lets you organize your feeds into a hierarchical view of sections if that’s comfortable for you:

Want one big “unread” bucket instead? Newsraft supports that. It’s called the “Explore” menu and it’s one keystroke (e) away and it is awesome. It’s my favorite interface in Newsraft and is what I’ve been using for screenshots in this post:

It’s worth noting that configuring colors, date format, display, key bindings is just a question of editing a textfile, as we expect from a Unix utility. Simply edit a file called $HOME/newsraft/config. While the defaults are sensible, you can have it your way. Obviously goal 3 was also covered ✅. I’ll post my config at the end of this post.

➜  ~ sqlite3 ~/.newsboat/cache.db "SELECT DISTINCT COUNT(*) AS subscribed_feeds
FROM rss_feed"
27

While I most often work in the Explore menu, let me show you how you might work with hierarchically categorized feeds.

To view a post, step into the provider’s mailbox:

Then Return on the post and get a text preview:

In the post, the text-oriented reader puts a numbered lists of external assets and images as “footnotes” at the end of the post. This allows me to focus on the content first.

I can then strike 2,i and launch a local preview of the image listed by footnote 2 in my iTerm (“What, display an image in the terminal? How? See below!”).

Hitting Return returns me back to the listing of Minimus’ posts.

I can optionally hit o to open in browser if I decide the post needs to be seen in Mastodon’s web interface (perhaps I want to reply).

The majority of Mastodon posts are not just captions around an image so this particular workflow isn’t the default. Consider this post from Anne Applebaum, journalist who adds some commentary and then links a relevant URL at some other site:

Here I see Applebaum’s observation and I also see where the article is linked. If I strike 2,o, Newsraft will open link 2 in my browser and I’ll hit the Wall Street Journal’s paywall.

Conclusion

Unlike Twitter, whose content is worse, with the use of a dedicated reader and Mastodon like an RSS distribution hub, you can actually “read it all” (provided you subscribe judiciously).

I’m still keeping the Mastodon iOS application on my phone for idle time, but I’m going to try to avoid it and prefer to consciously “Do Mastodon” with Newsraft.

Lastly, the developer of Newsraft has been very open to feedback and has quickly implemented all of my [feature requests]! I’ve been collaborating with Newsraft’s author about how to improve the app and he’s shipped shipped a number of my requests. I’m sure we’re iterating to an ever-better approach.

Appendix 1: Code for Generating RSS URLs

const localInstance = "techhub.social"; // Change to be your local instance;
const displayNameToRSSURL = (x) => {
  const xs = x.split("@");
  const onMyLocal = xs.length === 2;
  return (onMyLocal ? `https://${localInstance}/${x}` : `https://${xs[2]}/@${xs[1]}`) + '.rss'
}
alert(
  [...document.querySelectorAll(".account .display-name span")]
    .map( a => a.textContent)
    .map(displayNameToRSSURL)
    .join("\n");
);

Appendix 2: Displaying Images in iTerm

bind i exec clear; imgcat --url "%l"; read

Appendix 3: My Newsraft Configuration

# Set up "<link number>i" to pipe the link to `imgcat`
bind i exec clear; imgcat --url "%l"; read

# Above clobbers 'i' as mark important; restore it
bind z mark-important
bind ! mark-important
bind - mark-unimportant

# Colors
# Section listing
set color-list-section-unread-fg "cyan bold"
set color-list-section-fg "cyan"

# Within the feeds comprising a section
set color-list-feed-fg "cyan"
set color-list-feed-unread-fg "cyan bold"

# Individual posts
set color-list-item-fg "white"
set color-list-item-bg "black"
set color-list-item-unread-fg "yellow bold"
set color-list-item-unread-bg "blue"

• Newsraft
• Mastodon
• Social_networking
• Bbs
• Usenet

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