This is also my thinking. One other usecase would be to cross post this information from accounts on those liberal servers, which should minimize peoples anti-tanky reaction. it’s just news. Why not automate the process of posting the content we would have posted anyway?

There is a very interesting opportunity to proliferate stories automatically.

We have to keep in mind that people rarely read past the headline, and I’m not even excluding us tankies.

Part of locking the posts is to encourage cross posting, which makes the instance more visible. There is also a feature coming in the future that consolidates comments under a post from other threads with the same URL (aka crossposts).

So this would mean that even though the comments on the original thread are locked you would still be able to interact with other threads across the network from a central source.

I’m more interested in proliferation of the news stories, not so much high engagement with the original post on the primary instance.

Hot damn what a treasure trove of tools! Thanks for all this!

too much

Yeah, I feel that. I had to remove the SCMP main feed from lefty_news because it was just drowning out all the other slower posts. So I would want to be careful to not drown out things with slower feeds. My plan is to also try as much as possible to implement a one-feed-one-community rule, and for places like SCMP or the BBC where they offer many subfeeds, to be picky about which feed is actually included. This, I think, also touches on your points in the mainstream section.

goals

think it would be great to include stuff like lefty blogs and other websites that dont focus on news. Even like local organizations that occasionally post to their WordPress. Small feeds could maybe be grouped into multis and amplified to people who wouldn’t otherwise see them.

Yes! Absolutly. I want to not just have feeds covering current events from a left perspective but also providing critical analysis as well. I think I strike a reasonable balance right now with the list of feeds that are included in lefty_news. But I know we can do better, and I’ll also touch on this a little with the Moderation section.

Also I am curious how podcast and other multimedia feeds work on this system? YouTube/peertube channels have RSS feeds. It would be very useful to those following that kind of content to have it easily repostable and findable. But could be a whole kettle of fish.

I’ve included some Youtube feeds in Lefty_News already (they’re at the bottom of the list), and for the most part they work as you expect. They come through with the title of the YouTube video and a direct link to the video. However, I did have to remove some YouTube channels because of how frequently they posted YouTube shorts. On ibbit.at, this was a problem because there was no way to fitler out that content. However, I’m working on an RSS bot right now, so I’ll have the ability to filter out Youtube shorts. That might not be a huge issue though when I can break the publications into their own communities. As for podcasts, it should work fine as well. Most podcast feeds point back to some service that will provide a web-friendly URL for the podcast file itself, or is a system that understands when a web browser is accessing a post from the feed and an RSS reader and delivers content appropriately.

moderation

ibbit.at has always had comments open, from what I recall. As for moderation, as the admin of the site, I can remove posts as I see fit just like any other post on a Lemmy server. The RSS bot won’t repost the story since it’ll have already logged it as being posted. I do want to take a hands-off approach on a per-post basis; that being said, I want to also be more disserning about the feeds that are added. There was one feed (which you can see in the change log on the post I linked earlier) that became very suspicious over time. I noticed some unsavery comments in some of the posts (and reported them to no resolution), and with this recent Kirk situation, the posting on that blog was rather… antisemetic.

So I wouldn’t want to be the soul authority on what gets approved or not approved. I want to approve more than I deny, but I would like to be sure a publication is given a thorough examination, especially if it’s something obscure, say, a substack people have never heard of. Ideally, though, I would like to not be the only human in the loop when it comes to making editorial choices. I think if I’m going to build something like this, it would be good to have a collective discussion about any given publication. I do want to think of it more in terms of making editorial choices as opposed to moderation choices.

Additionally, I think it would be worth it to investigate some method of allowing community notes onto a post, say, via the comments or attached to the post body. I think that’s a future goal.

feed creation and scraping

There are already various floss projects that aim to scrape sites not providing a RSS to create one. You do not need to do this from scratch. If you can’t find, ping me and I will find my notes when am able.

I have one suggestion so far in the thread that I will investigate, and I’ll definitely ping you if I need any more suggestions.

Have you found out how ibbit is run? When I looked I was unable. I also found a couple times people directly asked the admin and he ignored the question.

So what I know is that the operator of ibbit runs his own RSS feed bot that processes and manages all the feeds. It would seem his tool is closed source and not publicly available. Which is fine. I’m currently using Lemmy RSS Pybot as a foundation to build from. I’m already working on a near-full rewrite of it that makes it more efficient and easier to extend. This supports keyword filtering, but I want to expand that idea into per-feed keyword filtering so that I can do things like filter out YouTube shorts or only grab YouTube shorts, or any other kind of per-keyword filter on a given feed. After tinkering around with Lemmy RSS Pybot, it’s given me a lot more ideas on how to make the management easier for myself.

I think I want to change the JSON configuration to something like:

[
    {
        "community": "example-feed",
        "feeds": [
            {
                "url": "https://example-feed.com/feed",
                "keywords": ["keyword1","keyword2"],
                "enabled": true
            },
            {
                "url": "https://example-feed.com/feed2",
                "keywords": [],
                "enabled": true
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "community": "another-feed",
        "feeds": [
            {
                "url": "https://another-feed.com/feed/",
                "keywords": [],
                "enabled": true
            }
        ]
    }
]

So that I can have the bot manage the community creation as well, instead of doing it manually. That way, when a new feed gets added, I can simply modify this configuration file, and the community gets created automatically.

• I might also want to include the option of providing a YAML file instead of JSON.
• I want to also add the option of providing a configuration file instead of the commandline switches.
• Additionally, I also need to make the RSS bot lock posts on creation.
• I want to have the option of adding a comment to the post as well, if I wanted to provide additional information, or a note or message with the posts.

I don’t think this will be very difficult to implement.

Anyway, thanks for your comment!

So, all a multi-community is is a way to construct a feed (like reddit multireddits) that is a combination of feeds from a list of communties. So for example, we might have 5 communities that post news from the UK, and we could have a UK multi-community that will aggregate all that news together into one feed. US News would contain publications specifically focused on the US. There could be an anarchist feed for blogs and critiques that are from an anarchist perspective, ML feeds, queer liberation feeds, etc. Using multi-community feeds allows a person to just subscribe to a bulk feed (which is basically what lefty_news is).

Here is the entry for the feature: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5601

It looks like this will be a user-defined group of communities that you can view as a single feed, and then by subscribing to that multi-community, it will automatically subscribe you to all the communities in that list (maximum 50). So they’re almost like “starter packs” for communities. When the owner of the multi-community updates the list of communities, it will have your account automatically subscribe to the new communities or unsubscribe to the removed communities.

So, having the threads locked doesn’t impact anything in relation to multi-communities. When you cross-post something, it creates a new post from your account on the target community/instance. It’s not linked to the original post in anyway.

Oh interesting! Thanks for the suggestion! I should play around with this.

(thumbnail duplicates like 30+ times in the body)

That is a specific issue with specific publications (counter punch, maybe others) and the way the ibbit bot converts the post body to markdown, I think. In my testing (I have a test instance on my desktop with an RSS bot running), I haven’t seen that with the RSS bot I’m using. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for that though. Glad to hear you’d subscribe!