How to get an RSS feed of your Mastodon bookmarks

Maybe you know this problem: You’re reading an interesting post on Mastodon, eventually containing a useful link or information, and you’d like to save it to come back to it later. Mastodon has a useful bookmark function with which you can save a post with just one click. Over time you accumulate bookmarks over bookmarks. However, what happens very rarely (or never at all) is that you ever take a look at your bookmark list again. Fortunately, there is a method with which you can possibly overcome this habit: You can subscribe to your bookmark list via RSS.

The cover image for this post was created with DALL·E 2. (Sourceꜛ)

How to get an RSS feed of your bookmarks

Mastodon doesn’t support the RSS feed of your bookmarks natively. There is a third-party service called Mastodon Bookmark RSSꜛ developed by Markus Unterwaditzerꜛ (untitaker on GitHubꜛ) that enables the feed.

The service requires only two inputs:

1. The name of your instance (e.g., “mastodon.social”)
2. An access token from your Mastodon account. To get the token, follow these steps:
   1. Go to the Applications settings panel of your Mastodon account (see screenshot below).
   2. Create a new application with permission to read bookmarks (and only that permission; uncheck all other permissions).
   3. Paste the access token of your newly created application into the corresponding form on Mastodon Bookmark RSS (see screenshots below) .

Mastodon Bookmark RSS will generate a unique URL of your bookmark feed. Add that URL to the subscription list of the RSS reader of your choice and you’re done.

Example layout of the Applications settings panel of your Mastodon account.

Once your application is created, you will see the corresponding token at the top of the application’s settings panel.

The Mastodon Bookmark RSSꜛ website. Enter the name of your Mastodon instance and the generated token into the corresponding forms.

Productivity tip

If your’re running a Zettelkasten either with DEVONthink or Obsidian, you can follow your RSS feed directly from within both apps. DEVONthink supports RSS feed subscriptions natively. Simply create a new feed and enter the link received above. In Obsidian, you first need to install the “RSS Reader”ꜛ plugin and enter the RSS feed to the subscription list on the plugin’s settings panel.