FeedSeer News is meant to suppliment (not replace) your regular Mastodon app by providing you with different views of the content of your feed that are difficult for a regular Mastodon client to provide.

FeedSeer currently provides four different views:

• News: The News view shows you the most popular links that have been shared in your feed across the selected timeframe, along with the posts associated with each link. This gives you a personalized view of the links and news that people in your feed are discussing every day. Think of it as your own, personal newspaper.

  This view is different than the "News" tab on Mastodon's Explore page, which shows popular news across your entire Mastodon instance. FeedSeer provides links that come specifically from your feed and the people that you have chosen to follow.

• Boosts: The Boosts view shows you posts from your feed that have been boosted the most by people you follow during the selected timeframe, but do not contain a link. (Posts that contain links will show up in the News view instead.) This view is different that the Posts tab on Mastodon's Explore page, which shows you popular posts across your entire Mastodon instance. FeedSeer only shows you posts that have been boosted by people that you have chosen to follow.

  This view is only available to subscribers.

• Hashtags: The Hashtags view shows you the most popular hashtags from your feed during the selected timeframe, and the posts that reference those tags.

  This view is only available to subscribers.

• Favorites: The Favorites view is based on the observation that the best content on Mastodon isn't necessarily the content that gets the most engagement. Sometimes, really insightful posts get lost in the noise on your timeline. This view is intended to help you keep track of your favorite Mastodon accounts. Select a small Mastodon "list" that you've configured in your account, and this view will show you the past day's posts from each member of that list, organized by list member.

  This view is only available to subscribers.

An important philosophical underpining of all the views provided by FeedSeer is that they are driven directly by the content of your Feed - the people that you chose to follow. We are not showing you content that is generally trending on your instance or that someone you follow liked but chose not to boost in their feed. This puts you, and the people you've chosen to follow, in control of what you are seeing.

By default, Mastodon servers don't cache enough of your feed history to enable clients to create really rich views.

When you join FeedSeer, you grant us read only access to your Mastodon account, and we use that access to monitor the feed of status updates from the people you follow, just like your Mastodon client does. We build up an archive of about 25 hours of content from your Mastodon feed. This allows us to provide personalized views of activity on your feed that are richer than a normal Mastodon client can provide.

As we collect your feed we throw out any "direct messages" because they aren't relevant to the views we create and we don't want to store them.

When you first join FeedSeer News we haven't been able to follow your feed yet, so we can only present results based on your server's cache (once we've had a minute to fetch it). After a day passes the results are usually richer.

If you stop using FeedSeer News for a while, we might stop following your account feed, because its expensive for us to keep your content around. If you come back, you can refresh your account. We'll start by showing you data from your server's cache, and we'll start monitoring your feed again.

The News view in FeedSeer is available to anyone free of charge, but it does cost money to operate the server infrastructure that is needed to cache your feed and provide this service. If you like FeedSeer, we'd appreciate it if you would help support it's operating costs by subscribing for $25 a year.

Subscribers get access to the Boosts, Hashtags, and Favorites views. We have to store more data from your feed in order to provide these views, so they cost a little bit more to provide.

When you first join FeedSeer you get a 30 day trial of the subscription, so that you can play with these views free of charge and see what they are like.

Thanks for subscribing to FeedSeer. If you need help with anything at all you can reach us by emailing: support (at) feedseer.com

No, of course not. FeedSeer's Privacy Policy is intended prohibit that. Subscriptions are the only revenue stream that FeedSeer has and the importance of protecting the privacy interests of our users guides all of our decision making.

Click on the eye icon () to view the post in a pop-up on the current window. This is usually the fastest way to see the post if you just want to read the full text, although some Mastodon servers respond faster than others.

It you want to interact with the post (boost it, for example) click on the open icon (). The post will open in a new window after redirection through your Mastodon server, so that you can interact with it through your account. This redirection is usually a little slower than clicking on the view icon.

Not yet, but on Apple devices you can click the "Share" button for any website and select "Add to Home Screen" and it will create an icon for you on your home screen as if the site was an app.

Many websites publish standardized metadata in their HTML code that is useful for providing rich previews. We try to collect this information, but unfortunately there are lots of web pages out there that don't publish it, or don't adhere very carefully to standards. Our software does its best to contend with different permutations but we are still working on it.

Several years ago a different group of people (not affiliated with me) used this domain name for a Mastodon tool that helped you filter content based on keywords. (This is a good idea and Mastodon has features like it built in today.) At some point the domain name was abandoned, and I picked it up. I first used it for a tool I built for Twitter, which used graph analytics to automatically curate lists of the people you follow. I've decided to continue using the name for social media projects, and I hope to be able to bring some of the graph analyic capabilites I created to Mastodon.