feediverse will read RSS/Atom feeds and send the messages as Mastodon posts. It's meant to add a little bit of spice to your timeline from other places. Please use it responsibly.

Install

pip install feediverse

Run

The first time you run feediverse you'll need to tell it your Mastodon instance and get an access token which it will save in a configuration file. If you don't specify a config file it will use ~/.feediverse:

feediverse

Once feediverse is configured you can add it to your crontab:

*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/feediverse

Run feediverse --help to show the command line options.

Tracking Updated vs. Published datetime

By default, the time comparison for fetching posts is done from the updated RSS tag. If you need to change this to avoid spam from frequently updates items (e.g. from YouTube), you can change this with the property

time: published

This can only be done per configuration file, not per feed.

Visibility

By default, posts will be unlisted. To change this, use the configuration property visibility, e.g.

visibility: public

Available values are documented in the Mastodon upstream project.

Content Warnings

You can CW all posts by adding the parameter:

cw: Spoiler Text

Rewriting URLs

The rewrite options can be used e.g. to swap links in the posts for more privacy-friendly options, or for load balancing on the feed source. Specify 1 source and multiple targets for random selection. Examples for using Invidious instances instead of YouTube in posts:

rewrite_target:
- source: https://www.youtube.com/
  targets:
  - text: https://invidious.snopyta.org/
  - text: https://yewtu.be/
  - text: https://invidious.kavin.rocks/
  - text: https://invidious.namazso.eu/
  - text: https://invidious.osi.kr/
  - text: https://yt.artemislena.eu/
  - text: https://tube.cthd.icu/
  - text: https://invidious.flokinet.to/

And load balancing while sourcing from Nitter instances:

rewrite_source:
- source: https://nitter.net/
  targets:
  - text: https://nitter.sethforprivacy.com/
  - text: https://nitter.pussthecat.org/
  - text: https://nitter.nixnet.services/
  - text: https://nitter.namazso.eu/
  - text: https://bird.trom.tf/
  - text: https://nitter.grimneko.de/
  - text: https://nitter.mstdn.social/
  - text: https://nitter.weiler.rocks/
  - text: https://tw.artemislena.eu/
  - text: https://de.nttr.stream/
  - text: https://nitter.privacy.com.de/
  - text: https://nitter.notraxx.ch/
  - text: https://nitter.lunar.icu/
  - text: https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/

Post Format

You can customize the post format by opening the configuration file (default is ~/.feediverse) and updating the template property of your feed. The default format is:

{title} {url}

If you want you can use {summary} in your template, and add boilerplate text like so:

Bookmark: {title} {url} {summary}

{hashtags} will look for tags in the feed entry and turn them into a space separated list of hashtags. For some feeds (e.g. youtube-rss) you should use {link} instead of {url}.

{content} is the whole content of the feed entry (with html-tags stripped). Please be aware that this might easily exceed Mastodon's limit of 512 characters.

Multiple Feeds

Since feeds is a list you can add additional feeds to watch if you want.

...
feeds:
  - url: https://example.com/feed/
    template: "dot com: {title} {url}"
  - url: https://example.org/feed/
    template: "dot org: {title} {url}"