Subscribe and Share

Under every article you can see two buttons: "Subscribe RSS" and "Share on Mastodon". This page will give you some information about what those do.

Subscribe RSS

RSS is a tool allowing people to subscribe to things on the internet without making accounts everywhere. There are various RSS Feed Readers that you can install that can get updates for you about new publications on websites.

On Mozilla Firefox there is a pretty neat extension called Easy RSS by Komodo.

If you don't want to use a browser extension, you can use something like Gnome Feeds or Feed Reader instead.

For those that like everything to be in the terminal, you can use something like Newsboat.

Usually providing a feed reader with the URL of the website is enough. But sometimes you may need to specify a direct path to the RSS itself. Clicking on "Subscribe RSS" will give you two direct RSS links:

The first one listing publications of the author of the post.
The second listing all publications on the website, from all authors.

Share on Mastodon

Mastodon is a Fediverse platform designed to look and feel similarly to something like Ex-Twitter. The website allows you to share links from it directly to Mastodon, but before you can do that it will ask you what instance you are using.

If you don't have an account on Mastodon, you can make one by going to joinmastodon.org, where instances will be suggested to you based on various things.

Mastodon, unlike conventional social media platforms, is not operated entirely by one company. But rather by many small communities that talk to each other all the time. This is called "Fediverse". So there is no single Mastodon website. You have many different ones called "Instances".

For example there is mastodon.social and mastodon.online and mstdn.social and many, many others. Because of that, the website has no idea which of them is the one you have. So it kindly asks you to tell the instance before you press the share button.

When you do press the share button, it will redirect you to a page on your Mastodon instance, where you will be presented with a suggestion of how to word the post. You can edit that if you want to and press "Post" to finish sharing.