Introducing Lemmy.link

Notorious@lemm.ee to Technology@beehaw.org – 129 points –

Hey Fediverse,

We've been working on something cool and wanted to share it with you. It's a new project called Lemmy.link, and it's all about making RSS feeds more accessible and useful on Lemmy.

We've noticed there's been a lot of talk in various communities about people shifting back to traditional RSS aggregators like Feedly, TT-RSS, and Newsblur. It got us thinking: why not bring those RSS feeds directly to Lemmy instead?

That's how Lemmy.link came to life. Right now, we have 10 communities collecting from over 30 RSS feeds, covering topics from World News and Technology to Business, plus some popular YouTube communities like News, Technology, and Explainers.

But we're just getting started, and this is where you come in. We'd love your ideas for new communities or RSS feeds to include. There's just one thing - to keep things running smoothly, we're focusing on shared interests and staying away from personal communities with custom feeds.

Also, please note, for now, lemmy.link is closed for signups. You'll need to subscribe from your current Lemmy instance. Once we've incorporated the upcoming 0.18.1 captcha update, we'll take a fresh look at this.

So, take a tour of Lemmy.link and let us know what you think. We believe there's huge potential for this project in the Fediverse and your input is a big part of that. Please provide any feedback on !meta@lemmy.link

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy what we've built so far with Lemmy.link.

-- Notorious

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I like the idea and to be honest it's probably better with registrations turned off so that all posts would only be from rss sources.

I'm definitely going to subscribe to a few of your communities!

What a coincidence, I just finished writing the first revision of my own bot for this. It's rough, but it works for me so far :)

https://github.com/kensand/rss-lemmy-bot

You know what they say about great minds!

I have an absolutely huge list of RSS feeds categorized out in TT-RSS, and split between full feeds and summaries. Might be useful for generating post body content. Let me know if you want it.

I would absolutely love to see it! The biggest hurdle so far has been finding quality RSS feeds.

Instance native community links

If your instance has not yet had someone subscribe, you may still need to search for the community before its viewable to you.

Links don't work for me, I just get "Couldn't find community" (I'm in Jerboa on Android).

I tried searching for 'yt_explainers', nothing comes up. Tried searching for lemmy.link, same. Tried searching for 'explaines', no results. Any tips? 😕

I have good luck usually by finding the original instance community html link and pasting into search, then waiting 15 seconds.

But getting the original html link is a little encumbersome.

FYI, kbin needs it without the !

Example: @space.
@space@lemmy.link

I'm on kbin.social and it doesn't seem to working here even with the @.

Maybe lemmy.link hasn't been federated with kbin yet? Not sure exactly how it all works as I'm still pretty new.

I am having a similar issue here at beehaw.org. I can't see anything from @lemmy.link listed in the communities.

I'm on kbin.social and it turns into a link

It seems to be working now.
When I search for @lemmy.link in magazines they all appear now, whereas before they didn't.

Cryptocurrency. You could bring together coindesk's rss feed, and bitcoin.com, etc

We'll get that one up here shortly.> Lemmy.link

edit: and its now live. might take a couple minutes before the refresh runs.

Great!

I was compiling a list of news and magazines feeds. It's far from complete, I don't know if it can help but here is the opml.

There is a lot of overlap between the feeds included because I grabbed the main feed and the categories wherever I could.

This is fantastic! Thank you!! I'll work through the list and see what I can do.

This is awesome! Thank you!

I have a lot of interest in software development (and the Rust programming language specifically). Any plans to add a software development community? I don't know of any feeds, though.

One of those things that sounds really cool and worth checking out, and then gets so complicated that it's hard to bother because Lemmy, or possibly Jerboa, is too complicated (or the app's not good enough).

If I click the Lemmy.link link, it opens in an in-app browser window, so no subscribing to the communities available. Do I need to modify the URL somehow to make Jerboa understand the link is Lemmy compatible? If so, is there somewhere to do that?

Thanks for sharing, and hope someone can help me understand how to get it working 😕

Yep. I was just trying to explain to my spouse how to subscribe to lemmy.link communities from their main instance. It is not intuitive at all. Unfortunately I don't have an Android device, but if you go to the Communities tab on beehaw.org you should be able to search for the communities on lemmy.link.

That's the conclusion I came to as well, except they're not showing up 😕 Or at least not the Explainers one, haven't actually tested the others. I'll try again later, thanks for the suggestion 😃

good idea : you can have a look to 'beehaw' instance comminities : it can be a good base for your project

That is a great idea.. I'll start looking into it. The hard part is finding quality RSS feeds that don't post a bunch of junk.

yes, i began to test : some post are real advertising and are annoying. You should be more selective on the RSS sources

Yep. As I start to see which RSS sources are junk I'll remove them and attempt to replace with better quality feeds. If you have any suggestions I'm all ears.

bbc news, reddit worldnews

Great catch! Can't believe I didn't already have that. I've added World News with BBC and Al Jazeera. Also added US News community with NBC and CBS US news feeds.

Reuters or ap are much better sources

I initially went with Reuters, but their feed is a bunch of patting themselves on the back for breaking news. Maybe they have different feeds I can find. Did not think of AP, but I'll get that one added because I agree that both are better (more neutral, fact based) sources.

do you know you can also convert subreddit into RSS feeds ? don't know if it will work after 1 july but it's an option

I considered this, but really would prefer to stay away from Reddit feeds. That feels like we're trying to bring Reddit to Lemmy and imho Lemmy should be its own thing. I could be persuaded if they keep RSS feeds around post-July 1st.

Do you have source for the bot? Curious to look under the hood. Great idea for an instance, though!

I'm still actively working on it, but once it's in a good place I'll throw it up on GitHub and post it to !meta@lemmy.link

Looking forward to it! Let us know when you do.