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Twitter via RSS

January 15, 2023 at 10:39 AM by Dr. Drang

I canceled my Tweetbot subscription a month or two ago and don’t go to Twitter anymore—the former followed from the latter—so I haven’t been caught up in the recent mess. But it was a reminder that I wanted to share a simple tip for fellow Twitter-leavers on the off-chance you didn’t already know it.

There are plenty of Twitter accounts I still want to read that haven’t set up parallel accounts on Mastodon. For example, @BridgesCanal is just photos of bridges over English canals. Most of them are quaint old masonry arch bridges that look like something you’d see in a period drama on PBS. They’re soothing to look at, and they speak to the structural engineer in me.

I read these accounts via RSS. 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.1

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.

NetNewsWire Twitter extension

If you’re not a NetNewsWire user, your feed reader probably has the same feature but in a slightly different guise. I know Feedbin has it. I would have checked out Feedly, too, but it now presents itself as this weird AI-driven thing that frankly scares me a little.

Oh, and if you’re one of those people who chucked RSS years ago on the “Twitter is my RSS” theory, you can always come back.

Update 1/16/2023 4:44 PM
I saw today, via this post by John Voorhees, that Federico Viticci wrote about using RSS to follow Twitter last week on Club MacStories. I missed Federico’s article because I dropped my subscription to Club MacStories shortly after I got my M1 MacBook Air and moved away from the iPad and Shortcuts.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Federico also mentioned this on Connected or MacStories Unwind. If so, I missed it, as I haven’t listened to an Apple-focused podcast in several weeks. Too many other things going on in my life recently. I’ve been skipping a lot of my RSS feed, too, although luckily I did see John’s post.

Anyway, I imagine that most of the people who read me also read/listen to Federico and may have wondered why I didn’t link to him. It’s because I didn’t know until now.

  1. Nota bene: I don’t have an account with RSS.app and know nothing about it other than that it can make RSS feeds from Twitter timelines. ↩

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