Years ago I had a ‘Twitter radar’: a script that interrogated the Twitter API about tweets using a range of specific hashtags. It then pulled all mentioned URLs from those tweets and gave me an overview of the URLs and their frequency shared around a topic in the last 24 hours and 7 days. It would resolve the shortened URLs to determine whether what was shared was a site, a blogpost, a video, presentation, pdf etc. My Twitter radar would also look at who was frequently mentioning a topic, as a potential person to follow on Twitter.

When Twitter tightened who could interact with their API, I stopped using it.

Frank having alerted me to the possibilitiy of pulling in RSS feeds around topics from different instances (including specialised ones), makes me think of re-instating my radar, but now looking at Mastodon, and basing it on RSS rather than API access.
It would mean I don’t have to look at Mastodon in Tweetdeck-style with 70 columns.
I track # to e.g. see what is being said about specific EU laws online (AI, data governance, data spaces related).

I will have a poke around in my FreshRSS feedreader’s database to see if I can cook some basic scripts for this.