Request to Mastodon instance operators: Provide a read-only anonymous HTML-only mode.
Update 2022-11-17: Mastodon supports RSS; try just tacking “.rss” onto the end of a Mastodon URL. It doesn’t seem to work for comment threads, but it does work for main threads. For example
M-x gnus ENTER G R https://mastodon.social/@markmccaughrean.rss ENTERwill create a Gnus group containing the author’s Mastodon posts. This is a nice workaround, though I do still hope logged-out HTML-only browsing will be possible again, post 4.x. Thanks to the helpful people on the #mastodon IRC channel for the above suggestion.
I’ve been following some Mastodon instances for several months. In Emacs, I type:
ESCAPE x eww ENTER https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral ENTER
and, without any authentication requirement, I’m greeted with a read-only HTML view of the instance, for example:
This week I tried another instance
ESCAPE x eww ENTER https://mastodon.social/@markmccaughrean ENTER
and I am blocked by:
Is this a new default? I was surprised that read-only anonymous HTML-only mode (ala Twitter classic and Nitter) is not supported by all Mastodon instances.