Star Collector

A tool to generate an RSS feed combining your starred/favorite content from Mastodon favorites and/or bookmarks, LinkedIn reactions and any personalized RSS feed you may have (for example Feedbin or Linkding or even GitHub). A GitHub Action rebuilds and publishes the feed every night.

Features

• Combines multiple star sources into a single RSS feed
• Configurable number of items per feed
• Support for Mastodon media attachments in feed items
• Hashtags of Mastodon posts become feed categories (tags)
• Environment variable support for sensitive tokens
• Detailed logging options
• Short headlines for Mastodon and LinkedIn posts, generated via OpenRouter and cached
• LinkedIn reactions (except plain likes) as a source, see below

Installation

1. Clone this repository
2. Install dependencies with uv sync
3. Copy .env.sample to .env and configure your tokens (including OPENROUTER_API_KEY for headlines)
4. Create a sc_config.yaml (see below) and configure your settings

Configuration

Create a sc_config.yaml file with your settings:

mastodon:
  access_token: "your-token-here"  # Can also be set via MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN env var
  mastodon_instance: "https://your.instance"
  mastodon_username: "yourusername"
  import_tags: true  # use the hashtags of a post as feed categories (default)

# Optional RSS configuration
rss:
  urls:
    - url: https://feedbin.com/starred/${FEEDBIN_ID}.xml
      tag: feedbin
    - url: https://bookmarks.ping13.net/feeds/${LINKDING_ID}/all
      tag: linkding

# Optional: headline generation, see "Headline generation"
titles:
  model: anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5

# Optional: LinkedIn reactions, see "LinkedIn reactions"
linkedin:
  enabled: true
  exclude_reactions: [LIKE]

Usage

# Basic usage (outputs to stdout)
uv run rss.py

# With options
uv run rss.py --config sc_config.yaml --output feed.xml --limit 10 --debug

Options:
  -c, --config TEXT                 Path to configuration file (default: sc_config.yaml)
  --debug / --no-debug              Enable debug output
  -o, --output TEXT                 Output file (optional, defaults to stdout)
  -l, --limit INTEGER               Number of feed items to include (default: 5)
  -L, --log-level [DEBUG|INFO|WARNING|ERROR|CRITICAL]
                                    Set logging level (default: ERROR)
  --help                            Show this message and exit

Ideas

• Spotify
• GitHub stars
• ...

Limitations

• Currently, there is no way to use the creation date of a like in Mastodon, see this issue.

LinkedIn reactions (optional)

Reactions on LinkedIn posts (except plain likes) and your reposts can be added as a star source through LinkedIn's Member Data Portability API (EEA/Switzerland members only):

1. Create a LinkedIn developer app with the Member Data Portability API (Member) product and add http://localhost:8799/callback as redirect URL.
2. Put LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID and LINKEDIN_CLIENT_SECRET into .env, then run make linkedin-token (once a year). Use make linkedin-token-ci to also update the GitHub secret LINKEDIN_ACCESS_TOKEN and the variable LINKEDIN_TOKEN_EXPIRES.
3. Enable the linkedin: block in sc_config.yaml. exclude_reactions takes reaction types (LIKE, PRAISE, EMPATHY, ...) and REPOST.

The API only returns the last 28 days, so reactions are accumulated in linkedin-state.json, which is published next to the feed and re-read on the next run. The state also remembers the last processed event, so a normal run asks LinkedIn only for new events (one request, which keeps well below the daily API quota); once a week, or when the state is missing, the whole 28-day window is read again. Post text is read from the public post page and turned into a headline. If the token expires, the feed still builds from the stored items and a warning is logged.

Token renewal. The token is valid for about a year. When fewer than 30 days remain, the nightly job opens a GitHub issue ("LinkedIn token expires soon") and you get the usual GitHub notification. Renew with make linkedin-token-ci and close the issue. The expiry date is kept in the repository variable LINKEDIN_TOKEN_EXPIRES.

Headline generation

Mastodon posts have no title, so one is generated with an LLM through OpenRouter (needs OPENROUTER_API_KEY; without it, the start of the post is used). Configure it in sc_config.yaml:

titles:
  model: anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5      # default
  fallback_model: qwen/qwen3.7-flash     # used if the primary fails
  max_new_titles_per_run: 100            # cost guard

Titles are cached in title-generator.cache (keyed by model, prompt and text), so only new posts cost money: typically well under USD 0.10 per month. The GitHub Action persists the cache between runs. Compare models with make title-bakeoff.

Development

make help   # all targets, grouped by purpose
make test   # run tests (no network)
make lint   # ruff

Architecture diagrams live in docs/diagrams/.