Reading Twitter and Mastodon in NetNewsWire
Once upon a time, RSS feeds were part of Twitter, but those days have long since passed. Now you have to use either the Twitter features built into your RSS reader or use a specialized service like RSS.app.
As a NetNewsWire user, I set up its Twitter extension, which uses my Twitter account’s credentials, to access these accounts’ timelines and present them to me as if they were any other RSS subscription.
This is what I’m doing now, and it works quite well, even showing avatar images. Of course, there’s no telling whether the API will keep working. Feedbin can do this, too, though I find that it’s much slower to update with new tweets.
Though the UI doesn’t expose it (we should fix that, yes), you can subscribe to a Twitter list in NetNewsWire.
I’m also using NetNewsWire for Mastodon. As with Twitter, what I like compared with a lot of the clients is that it works well for reading in batch mode. It doesn’t lose posts if I get behind or mess up the scroll position when loading more in the middle of the timeline. I also like having explicit read indicators.
NetNewsWire doesn’t have an extension for Mastodon, and Mastodon doesn’t offer an RSS feed of your timeline, so I subscribe to each user’s individual RSS feed. There’s also no Mastodon feed for mentions, but it has reliable e-mail notifications (unlike Twitter).
All in all, I’m pleased to be able to follow multiple accounts for multiple services all in the same window. It works well on my iPhone, too. I never really liked reading RSS feeds on iOS, but it’s great with these short posts. I can quickly star the ones I want to do something with on my Mac, avoiding the slow, multi-tap process I had been using to share tweets to OmniFocus.
Previously:
- Twitter Claims Apps Blocked for Violating API Rules
- Twitter API Down
- Migrating From Twitter to Mastodon
- NetNewsWire 6.0 for Mac
Update (2023-02-03): Brent Simmons:
Because of Twitter’s announcement that free access to the Twitter API will end February 9, we will be removing Twitter integration from NetNewsWire in the next release (6.1.1) for Mac and iOS.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I might give this a try. It may help me open Mastodon clients less often on my phone or tablet and save my microblogging consumption to on the Mac only.
[…] Michael Tsai – Blog – Reading Twitter and Mastodon in NetNewsWireI’m also using NetNewsWire for Mastodon. As with Twitter, what I like compared with a lot of the clients is that it works well for reading in batch mode. It doesn’t lose posts if I get behind or mess up the scroll position when loading more in the middle of the timeline. I also like having explicit read indicators. […]
I'm doing the same thing with Mastodon accounts + NetNewsWire. That said, it never occurred to me to try to get an RSS feed for my Mastodon feed as I don't have a Mastodon account. That's the real win as far as I'm concerned - I don't need to have a Mastodon account anywhere to follow posts on Mastodon. That's how the open web is supposed to work.