Follow RSS feeds from Lemmy

Fediverse@lemmy.world – 123 points – 2 months ago

Ever wanted to have an RSS feed in Lemmy? Well now you can!

rss.ponder.cat is set up to mirror any RSS feed into a community. You can subscribe to the feed like any other community and you'll get every new story as a Lemmy post.

Check it out:

!nytimes@rss.ponder.cat

!bbc@rss.ponder.cat

!arstechnica_science@rss.ponder.cat

Leave a comment with any RSS feed and I'll create a community for it, and then you can have RSS in your Lemmy.

Check it out!

Simpsons reference: your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your communities

As someone who has been using RSS readers multiple times per day since 2009, I like the idea of being able to have threaded conversations with you lot on the stuff I'm reading all day.

I like RSS but there's no way to sort through the actually interesting content vs. just literal ads (looking at you, TechRadar).

Crowd sourcing the content helps.

Yes. I want to avoid having it become spam, so I decided to be careful which RSS feeds I add to keep the human-to-bot ratio up.

I mean you can leverage the votes of Lemmy to drown out ads from otherwise-interesting sources.

Lemmy thunderdome community! All posts get fed in from RSS, but if they don't get upvoted by the time the time limit has passed, they get deleted!

I am joking, I think. It's an interesting idea though. I don't think relying on the algorithm to stem the tide of bot-posted content is a completely complete solution, since I have definitely seen bot-provided communities which annoyed me with the volume of 1-upvote posts which the bot was putting up. I am planning to try to limit the feeds available to those that have a respectable amount of human interaction.

I don't think relying on the algorithm to stem the tide of bot-posted content is a completely complete solution

Yeah. That's not what I said. I said it would help to filter ads from otherwise-interesting sources.

I understand now. I thought you meant something different by crowdsourcing. No worries.

Even better, you can then follow those communities as an RSS feed!

This is freaking awesome, can you combine several feeds into one community ?

No idea, what I linked is a built-in feature of Lemmy (every community has an RSS feed) but you'd have to ask OP about how their custom communities are created

It'd be easy to do. What did you want to have combined? I'm not sure it would be much better than people subscribing to multiple communities to combine different feeds together, but what were you thinking?

All related news feeds for example:

Linux
Gaming
Self Hosting

I don't think mirroring from Lemmy RSS to Lemmy is useful, though. Is that what you're talking about? Why not just subscribe to the different available communities?

I was talking about multiple RSS feeds, for example: ZDNET Linux + Phoronix auto-posted to one Lemmy community.

Oh, got it. That's a really good idea. Although I do think that the comment recommending fediverser.network may be a better way. You can avoid duplicate stories from multiple news sources, and cast a wider net without creating overwhelming spam, as well as integrating better with a flexible local community.

Any chance to tell us what tool you use for that?

I have some communities where i'd like to automatically post github release posts into.

It's a hacked-together python script. Should I try to clean it up and open source it? It's not well-organized right now, though.

I'd be interested, yes.

But if you don't feel like publishing it at the current state and don't plan to "clean it up" any time soon, don't rush it. There are some bots out there that could do the trick if i sit down properly^^

Yes, please.

If you could, I'd appreciate HackADay. I've found a community for it on lemmy.ml, but it only seems to have one post from a year ago.

!hackaday@rss.ponder.cat

Thank you!

Awesome. I always thought Lemmy would make a great RSS reader!

It says all these communities are completely empty?

I just set it up. Everyone's afraid to break the seal.

Oh it's working now, cool. I can send you my whole OPML if ya want 😅

Let's have it 😄

I don't know how to send it to ya. Shoot me a message on Matrix @Ulrich:nope.chat

I don't think that the Austin or Texas communities are useful as communities. Do you mind if I delete them?

Are there other feeds from your OPML that you would really like to have in Lemmy?

I don't mind at all. I messaged you on Matrix about this but I already unsubscribed due to the large quantity of posts and lack of any participants, meaning they just overwhelmed my timeline and were no different from my RSS reader.

I think participation might be a problem with the relatively small size of Lemmy userbase, as well as the very poor sorting algorithms. I've seen 3 month old posts, and posts with hundreds of downvotes at the top of my feed fairly often. So I'm afraid it may never be what I hoped.

The only advice I can give to improve the experience is to cherry-pick some publishers who only post valuable content, and not terribly often.

I can cherry-pick some good tech publications to make a tech community (it's FOSS, The Verge, AlternativeTo, Jeff Geerling, etc.) . Or some good fedi publishers to make a fedi community (Mastodon, Ghost, etc.) Or a self-hosting community (NASCompares, HexOS, Selfh.st, etc.)

I may just have to send them to you individually because I don't know how to pick and choose feeds to export.

Not a problem at all. I think a better way to do that will be to let moderators of existing communities add the bot to their existing communities. Someone asked about doing that, and it's easy to set up the bot to make it possible, so I think I'll just do that instead. I don't need to create a duplicate community for anything that's already got one.

I'm fine with the existing structure, with one community per periodical. I tried !coding_blogs@rss.ponder.cat and !science_streams@rss.ponder.cat and it looks like some people are into that type of structure, but I'm thinking mostly in terms of one-periodical communities or moderators from off-instance communities being able to add things.

Are there any that you would cherry-pick that you think you would personally use? I'd be perfectly willing to add them, if so.

I'm thinking mostly in terms of one-periodical communities or moderators from off-instance communities being able to add things.

That was my idea 😂

Are there any that you would cherry-pick that you think you would personally use?

Hard to say which ones would be popular...

Hmm, Church and State... I much prefer having a separate RSS reader (FreshRSS in my case) for news, as I see it, and lemmy for more frivolous purposes. YMMV.

Same here. This seems valuable for anyone who would want Lemmy to be a first-class RSS reader. But I prefer to just use my RSS reader and add feeds to that.

I use a combination of RSS feeds provided by Lemmy and the ones provided by openrss.org, which has most if not all news sites nytimes, bbc, etc.

I think they can both be useful. Some people will prefer to have an RSS reader pulling the feeds from Lemmy communities, and some people will prefer to have Lemmy as their home base, so to speak, and like to be able to add updates from some RSS feeds to that.

Interesting idea!

This is awesome! I feel like you've really improved Lemmy with this. Be proud!

😁

Can we mirror very niche Reddit communities? Edit: would be great to have a website where we could paste the RSS feed and get this set up automatically.

May I ask what communities are you interested in? I don't want to automatically post things, but you might be interested in the "Community Ambassadors" feature of https://fediverser.network. Ambassadors can add multiple RSS feeds and use them as source of content to their communities, and then they can repost whatever they think is interesting.

Wait posts will be manually reposted by real users?

I may be ok with that. I hate non-useful Reddit repost bots and I’m banning/defederating them instance wide.

If things will work manually, I would ask users if they want it. What do you think @QuazarOmega@lemy.lol?

Exactly. The idea is to move away from automatic reposting and simply to make it as easy as possible to bring the content from other places and to show people on Reddit that they can migrate easily.

This is an absolutely excellent idea. I don't think I will allow this for Reddit feeds, since there are two better ways of getting them on Lemmy already.

I think it's a pretty decent feature to have

Currently I’m missing:

Apple Maps
Aqara
FIREUK
Monzo
ipv6
tradfri
trading212
TrySwitchBot
Withings
OctopusEnergy

It’s a pretty big list, but these are the main communities which force me to still have Reddit account. Maybe one day we will be able to complete get rid of it but not today.

This is not a long list at all, and some of these communities you are mentioning might be a good for https://indiehackers.space. The best way you can help me now is by signing-up to https://fediverser.network and adding the subreddits that you are missing and use the "request a community" for the ones that are missing.

I also went ahead and created !applemaps@poweruser.forum if you want to get started. :)

I think @rglullis@communick.news has a suggestion that is better than using Reddit's RSS through my tool. Importing Reddit communities via RSS may become spam and stunt the growth of a real local community based around the same topic.

There's a server doing that already, I think https://lemmit.online/

Registrations are closed - This isn’t supposed to be a community in itself, but to provide Reddit content to those who miss it in these early days of the Reddit migration.

Still very active from what I can see.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Whatever you want, yes. I separated it from the main server exactly so that all kinds of stuff could get mirrored without creating a problem.

I said that I would mirror any community, but I thought about it more, and now I am worried about creating spam. I agree with the other posters that the community ambassador feature would be a better way to do this.

Maybe you could add a meta community for such requests?

Also Phys.Org feeds please?

Cheers

Anti Commercial-AI license

!requests@rss.ponder.cat

and

!phys@rss.ponder.cat

Phys.org does what some of the others do, offer a massive menu of options for the RSS feeds. I picked out their top stories feed only, to cut down on spam. I don't want to have a huge list of bot-posted communities with no activity. Are there any of the specific ones that you want to have, besides the top headlines?

Awesome, thanks for creating the communities.