I manage !lefty_news@ibbit.at and it is currently the most active and subscribed-to community on ibbit.at.

I don’t have many issues with the site operator; we disagree at times about the content being posted, usually on the Ukrain/Russia lines, but generally he’s been good at keeping the space hands off.

I want to include more international news, but I don’t want to totally choke the community. For example, SCMP’s main feed absolutely outpaced every single post from all other feeds combined, and I ended up splitting its feed into US/Canada and China only, so that slower feeds were more visible.

With Lemmy 1.0 around the corner and multi-community feeds being one of the big features, it feels like a good time to build a site like this so that we can curate multi-community news feeds around all kinds of intersections of news.

I have a few thoughts on how this site might operate similarly and differently than ibbit.at:

1. lefty_news gets plenty of comments, more than any other feed on ibbit.at, and I already know I don’t have the energy and time to actually moderate that level of activity. So I’m proposing all posts created by the RSS bot are locked by default.
2. I want to try and minimize cross-over with ibbit.at, meaning I’ll leave the more liberal feeds to ibbit.at and existing feeds (except for lefty_news, which I’ll likely wind down if I build this site). I know that these RSS bots effectively constitute spam, which is why I’m also interested in building an instance so users can block it if they decide they do not want to see these bot posts.
3. I want to try and engage with people who subscribe so we can build the list of publications being served in a collective way. Building a truly international proletariat news feed.
4. I aim to utilize communities as much as possible; this, however, does pose the issue of fragmenting the base of users until multi-communities are implemented. I think about some of the voices on the left, however, and how they are utilizing multiple avenues for engagement, and that it would be useful to take the various feeds of a person like Caitlin Johnstone (for example) and combine them into a single Caitlin Johnstone community.
5. I want to also turn this into a kind of call to action, where we can either A) encourage publications that do not have RSS feeds for their content to implement it or B) build / source tools that allow us to monitor incompatable publications and still post their new activity.

I do worry that locking the posts might stifle the usefulness of the site. I honestly never thought people would be interested in engaging in the comments of a post generated by a Bot, but they are. On the flip side, I feel like by having the posts locked, we can ensure that Federation is as open as possible (minus the obvious rightwing/nazi agacent instances). Using something like https://lemmy-federate.com/ we can have these feeds pushed to instances across the Lemmy network automatically, which will bring them into the All feed of those instances. I feel like it’s a unique opportunity to bring exposure to leftist news, sources, opinions, and perspectives, directly to the larger federated network.

So what do you all think about this idea? If you use !lefty_news@ibbit.at, what do you find useful about it, and what do you not? I’ll also take domain suggestions; I do have one in my pocket already, but I’m open to suggestions.