Can’t go to the protests today but you still want to know what’s going on? Check out this tool I made to monitor hashtags at the larger Mastodon instances and aggregate them into a browser tab that refreshes automatically. I set it up because I have a tiny instance and our news flow isn’t great. You can use it too! You don’t have to have a API key or even a Mastodon account. Everything runs off RSS feeds.
The tool is called VibesMasto News Monitor; I put it on GitHub https://github.com/ResearchBuzz/VibesMasto-News-Monitor . It is SUPER EASY to set up – if you can edit a text file you can do this. Here are the steps.
Step 1: Download the index.html page from https://github.com/ResearchBuzz/VibesMasto-News-Monitor/blob/main/index.html . The download icon’s over at the right side of the page.
That will save the index.html file to wherever your downloads go. If you double click the file, it’ll probably open in your browser . Feel free to do that just to see what it looks like before you change the settings. When you’re ready to edit it, try right-clicking and “open with” to open index.html in a text editor.
Now let’s change some settings by editing this file. Everything we want is in the script part so scroll down to the <script> tag.
Step 2: The first thing you can change is the set of hashtags being monitored, which is part of the rssFeeds array. The hashtags monitored in the screenshot below are rss, opensource, and foss Just change the part between / and * to whatever hashtags you want to monitor. And remember, these are hashtags, so no spaces!
You could try:
‘https://mastodon.social/tags/handsoff.rss‘,
‘https://mastodon.social/tags/activism.rss‘,
‘https://mastodon.social/tags/resist.rss‘,
The next part you can change is the media source being monitored in the first column. That’s the feedUrl variable. You can use any news RSS feed; Facebook has a huge list at https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/rss-urls-1.pdf .
(RE the function name — Yes, I know my function names are ridiculous. I made this two years ago and I am smarter now.)
Step 3: To change the trends showing in the middle column, change the URL in the response variable. Right now it’s https://mastodon.social/api/v1/trends/links . You can trade the mastodon.social in the URL with any instance that has an open feed. The URL for Toot.Wales, for example, would be https://toot.wales/api/v1/trends/links .
That’s it! Save the file and open it in your browser again. It should load with your new feeds and hashtag monitors in place.
If the page fails to load in your browser, make sure that every variable you’ve changed still has quotes around it. Accidentally-deleted quote marks will get you every time. Also make sure that each quoted line in an array is separated by a comma, like so:
‘one’,
‘two’,
‘three’,
I use VibesMasto by pinning it in a browser tab and checking it now and again. It refreshes the news source every ten minutes and the Mastodon hashtags/trends every five so you don’t have to.
Enjoy!
