Answers to some potential questions about this page.
This deployment of Masto2RSS is run by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, who is on Mastodon @gedankenstuecke@scholar.social.
If you decide to login through the Mastodon authentication process, this page gets read only access to your Mastodon home timeline, which can include non-public posts by the people you follow.
This app only uses this read-access to extract all the links posted into your home-timeline on a rolling basis - and to once a day aggregate these links into the "X most frequently posted links", that are made available as an RSS feed.
The non-aggregated information from each post with a link in it does not store the actual text of the post to not store the non-public posts themselves. Instead, only the link, the time it was posted and the link to the actual Mastodon post are saved.
Older, non-aggregated links will be deleted in regular intervals to minimize storage. Furthermore:
You can delete your account on this page at any time, which will also delete all of the links that were stored.
Currently this app is setup to query the Mastodon home timeline ~ every 6 hours. For most people this should be enough to grab all links, as the Mastodon API as of October 2024 allows fetching the last 800 posts. Unless you follow a lot of people (or very vocal people) there probably will not be more than 800 posts per 6h window.
Then once a day, at just after midnight UTC, another process takes all of the posts from the last day period to extract the most common links.
It's really basic: For all the links seen during the last calendar day, sum up how often each of them was seen and rank them based on that. Then put the top X of them into an RSS feed.
Duplicate links are not counted and defined as the same link being posted more than once by the same user, regardless of when the link is encountered again. This avoids the same links appearing again and again, as some posters like to boost and reshare links to e.g. their own writings.
Absolutely, the code is open source and comes with instructions to deploy your own version by yourself. The requirements for servers are intentionally low. E.g. this deployment runs on Uberspace.