My friend Colby
made an app that provides RSS feeds for Twitter accounts. I was using something like this, but it broke down, so now I can see what's up with various pals. (Though I've noticed, there's not a ton of content actually from the people about their lives on Twitter. It's mostly retweets, quote tweets, and statements about Twitter. It was probably the same back when I was on there.)
It's a good combo with
Privacy Redirect. When you click through to a tweet, Privacy Redirect will redirect you from Twitter to a Nitter instance, so you can just read the tweet without getting a popup about signing up for Twitter.