How to get Mastodon replies into an RSS feed (ReadYou / OpenRSS issue)

zzz

I follow the official Graphene account on Mastodon via RSS:
https://grapheneos.social/

The URL I used to subscribe is this:
https:/openrss.org/grapheneos.social/ [@] GrapheneOS
(there are weird formatting issues with that @ symbol in the forum that I'm struggling to fix, hence the brackets, sorry about that)

OpenRSS is great because they allow me to get notified not only about posts from an account, but also replies.
https://openrss.org/blog/mastodon-rss-feeds

Contrast that to the vanilla Mastodon RSS implementation, which you'd get by using this link:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS.rss
It offers visibility on posts only, not replies:

you will not see replies or posts with other visibility.
https://fedi.tips/following-mastodon-and-fediverse-accounts-through-rss/

Today I get a message directly injected into my RSS feed from the devs at OpenRSS. They say that they'll no longer serve content to ReadYou. They told me this in a followup email:

[...] ReadYou is making quite a bit of requests all at the same time and causes a strain on our servers. We're limited by a few donations, so we can't yet afford a larger infrastructure to accommodate such an influx of requests.

Unfortunately, we don't publicize every RSS reader that has this issue. But we do send response codes to them, which indicates to the ReadYou app that it's making too many requests. It's up to ReadYou's developers to adjust their app to resolve the issue. They haven't resolved it yet, which is why you're seeing that message.

If you're interested in switching RSS readers, we have a dedicated page that lists some good ones at https://openrss.org/rss-feed-readers

Some questions for the community here:

1
Is there an alternative way to see Mastodon replies via RSS in ReadYou?
Hoping I don't need to switch RSS readers just to look at Mastodon replies via RSS, it can take a while for me to reconfigure.

2
I see folks recommend ReadYou all the time over here, and I've been enjoying it so far.
But I can't help but wonder - could ReadYou be contributing to an unhealthy RSS ecosystem with their practices?

OpenRSS certainly seems to be implying that. If OpenRSS is seeing strain like this from ReadYou, I imagine other devs from other RSS-enabling tools could be feeling the pain as well.

There's doesn't appear to be an issue for this on ReadYou's Github page at the time of this writing
https://github.com/Ashinch/ReadYou/issues?q=is%3Aissue+openrss
Could anyone here comment on this claim of ReadYou's wrongdoing from OpenRSS?

Thanks all for your time ~

de0u

zzz Could ReadYou be contributing to an unhealthy RSS ecosystem with their practices?

It sounds plausible. I am not an RSS expert, and the mail didn't say which response codes OpenRSS is using to try to alert ReadYou, but the basic idea makes sense. Engineering large systems is complicated. A strategy that works fine when an app has only a few users might be less fine later. It's also possible that truly-giant sites just throw resources at powering through load spikes, but that OpenRSS doesn't have the ability to do that.

Dumdum

zzz OpenRSS is great because they allow me to get notified not only about posts from an account, but also replies.

Is there an alternative way to see Mastodon replies via RSS in ReadYou

Why not use the RSS link with replies included? https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/with_replies.rss

zzz

de0u

Ahh yeah, I agree all of those explanations sound plausible.

Seeing that I can get replies from vanilla Mastodon now, there's no reason to use OpenRSS or quit ReadYou.
Status quo for me. Hopefully I will not be spamming the GOS Mastodon server (or someone else?) with too many requests from ReadYou this way 😅

zzz

Dumdum

Amazing, thank you!

Do you know where I could learn more about these kind of RSS URL configuration options?
I was struggling to figure out where the Mastodon project documents its RSS features.

Dumdum

zzz
I don't I'm afraid. I only knew about that link because you can do literally the exact same with a Nitter link (example: https://nitter.poast.org/Starbucks/with_replies/rss) so I figured Mastodon would function similarly. (EDIT: I know you can do a link for the Media tab of an account, simply replace with_replies with media)

By the way, did you mean replies from or to the GrapheneOS account? I realised that the RSS feed only gives replies from, which might not be what you're looking for. If you want replies to, then I don't know of a way.

zzz

Dumdum

Deep lore, I love it.

By the way, did you mean replies from or to the GrapheneOS account?

Good question, just replies from