[smacktoward]

You can get an Atom feed of any Mastodon user's toots, if you know the right URL format to ask for or have a feed reader that can do autodiscovery. To demonstrate, here's mine:

https://octodon.social/users/jalefkowit.atom

This means that you can drop a Mastodon user into your feed reader and follow them the way you would follow any feed-enabled web site. No Mastodon account required; in fact, once you know the schema for feed URLs, all you need is their username and you don't need to touch a Mastodon site even once.