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.

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    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!