Really great tool, thanks!

Thank you!

In the commands, will {instance} always be rss.ponder.cat?

create account on rss.ponder cat

Or do you make the communities and then we add feeds to them?

No to all. This particular tool is only for communities on other instances. It doesn't interact with the big feeds on rss.ponder.cat.

rss.ponder.cat is for the all-RSS-post communities that I've been making. A lot of them will be pretty heavy on their posting, so some people may prefer to block the whole thing wholesale. I can add communities if people request it, but it's something I want to be a little bit careful with, so as not to create too much spam.

This new tool is designed to add RSS feeds to communities outside of ponder.cat. Something like releases of a FOSS project, weather updates for a city, things like that. The moderators of those communities can use the bot to do whatever they want within their communities, without having to involve me.

Does each message need to have only one command?

No, you can issue multiple commands. It should work fine. Of course if it gives you any issues, you can let me know.

Edit: Otter already answered, I just didn't see it. I'm leaving it for posterity, though.

This is a very good idea. Slashdot hit on something very good with their scoring and moderation system, and then the lessons were forgotten in the systems that came after Slashdot.

There are so many small tweaks like this tagging idea that would improve things, that I think the way to do it is a frontend "plugin" system that can accommodate them without it being a big fandango of tweaking the core to include fifty of these little nubbins all over the codebase.

Nothing that's ordained from on high will ever be completely perfect. If you can have a little text box on your custom frontend, where you can tweak your own UI features, and then talk with the instance admin about importing one of those little tweak plugins for the whole site, or for your own community only, that sounds like a huge step forward to me. If you've ever added little tweaks to Wordpress, with the custom CSS boxes or by adding a few lines to functions.php, I envision this being similar.

This is all much more ambitious than I was thinking of when I asked this original question, but it would be a lot of fun to work on. If the result was it going back up into Lemmy, and each instance having its own collection of tweaks and a thriving community of people working on them without needing to disrupt the pace of development on the core, that would be a pretty excellent outcome.

It’s not absolutely safe against bots and sockpuppets, but it surely makes it more expensive than even a $10/account membership.

I think, sadly, that either sending in your national ID or paying $10 would be unacceptable to so many people that it would make it a lonesome failure of an experiment. I'm on your side about the idea, but I think people would just take the path of least resistance and create their sockpuppets on some other instance, and your main accomplishment would be driving away legitimate users.

PIxelfed is still just supporting ActivityPub. I’m talking about multi-protocol communication. A smart client should be able to let you communicate with Lemmy communities, subreddits, Facebook groups and all types of different platforms from a single unified interface. There are plenty of people that think this is something undesirable (like everyone that wants instances to block Threads), but I’d argue that building these integrations with closed platforms would eventually destroy them because they would lose the monopoly on network effects.

I get it. Aren't there projects that are working on that? Friendica and Emissary? Adding integrations with closed-source networks to those isn't too hard. At that point, it's not its own web app anymore, though, more akin to an email program. It's a good idea but it's different than what I had in mind. You will also have to deal with API limits or terms of service and legal issues, once you start looping in the closed-source networks.

No, but you could have a web server that responds to multiple domains. Ideally, the server listening and responding to the AP requests should be able to work with multiple “virtual servers”, instead of having to have only one instance == one domain that we today. AFAIK, only Takahe does this for microblogging.

Yes, that part's not overly hard. I'm already doing virtual servers for ponder.cat and rss.ponder.cat, to run them both on the same VPS, and I'll probably add more virtual servers for development of frontend tweaks if I keep going with Lemmy. Some of the ideas I had in mind for hackable frontends involved wildcard virtual servers to serve people custom "instance" sites off a subdomain that's different from the actual actor ID instance name.

What I'm saying is that if someone's actor ID from the POV of the rest of the Fediverse is still https://ponder.cat/u/rglullis, and ponder.cat goes down, nothing that either ponder.cat or any new instance can do, can "catch" requests that are being directed to that actor ID. You have to make the actor ID either https://rglullis.com/u/rglullis or https://rglullis.sometrustedthirdparty.com/u/rglullis from the beginning, and arrange for ponder.cat to be handling any traffic for those domains, so that you can switch away from the ponder.cat instance later on if you want to.

Of course, you can tell people that they can either have a ponder.cat user, or a rglullis.com user if they want to buy their own domain for their user, and they can have an actor that will be transferrable from ponder.cat to any other Lemmy server that supports the feature. It wouldn't work with current Lemmy, but in theory it could be made to work, if someone were willing to make the right Lemmy changes. It would be tough but it might be worth it.

Overall I think it might be better to address the same issue at the protocol level as some other federated social media networks do, so you're not introducing crazy new requirements on both the server and user experience side in order for people to be able to transfer their users later.

I agree on the customizability.

The community aspects that form a reason to join this instance specifically are key, of course, but I have none of that. I just made this place. Now I need to make it neat enough that at least one person sees some reason to join, instead of one of 200 other already-popular instances.

I think making the frontend more customizable would be good for Lemmy as a whole, and also if I'm tinkering with it on this instance, maybe that can give a flavor to the instance and give a benefit to people who do decide to come by. It is more ambitious than I was thinking of, but I just looked for a while and it is not insurmountable.

/c/backpage

No no, that is a bad idea.

Can you give some examples? I don't want it to become botspam. If the RSS bot is creating duplicate postings, then I may need to fix or adjust something.

This is an excellent idea. I made !meta@rss.ponder.cat and made a sticky post.

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.

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 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.

😁

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