Howdy folks!

I've been reflecting on the spread of content found in !pravda_news@news.abolish.capital and did a little investigating. I had a feeling that there were some British publications that were highly represented in the feed, but wanted to confirm if that was really true. Here are my findings:

| Source | Share of pravda_news | Rank | |

|

|

| | thecanary.co | 18.4% | #1 (dominant) | | morningstaronline.co.uk | 4.6% | #5 | | novaramedia.com | 2.2% | #13 | | Total Share of British Sources | 25.2% | - |

25% of the feed, is quite a lot. It doesn't help as well that morningstaronline.co.uk has sports coverage that I've tried to filter out of the feed. Sadly, the RSS they provide does not tag their posts in any way. This means I would need to perform some kind of look up on that specific publication for sports related keywords and bounce the post, which is going to be very prone to error and false positives.

A new community focused on Great Britain.

So, I've decided to move these publications into a new community !Britain@news.abolish.capital. Which will house them going forward. If you want leftist news about Britain, you can find it there. This also allows for more British publications to be added to the site without feeling like I'm contributing more Britain focused content into an already British skewed feed. At the time of this posting, there are about 15 stories in the queue, once those have run their course, you'll see the publications in the table above begin posting in this new community.

My goal for pravda_news has always been one to highlight world news, and that can be a struggle depending on available sources, and those sources rate of posting. theconnary.co Is a good example. This brings me to another idea that I've had in my head for a while now.

Cross posting from communities (idea)

This isn't implemented yet, but it could be easy to do. The idea is simple. In the other communities, top stories (of a given time-span, undecided at this moment) would be cross-posted into !pravda_news@news.abolish.capital. This would effectively act as a community filter, taking what people found upvote worthy over the last X hours in other communities, and automatically cross-posting those stories into !pravda_news@news.abolish.capital.

This would allow the site to have these siloed communities with focused themes, but still serve that content into the larger, more populated feed. Hopefully in turn it encourages people to join those other feeds.

No timeline on this feature currently. But would be interested in hearing people's thoughts.

Reflecting

I hope this content has been useful to you in some way. I'm always surprised to see how many people engage with the feeds provided here! There is a great diversity of participation from across the network, which is encouraging! It feels like this site has been in operation for much longer, but we've only been up for the last 8 months. So much has happened in that 8 months time as well, and these feeds have chronicled a lot of it.

Thanks for reading!

I merged the bug from a few weeks ago back into the code after trying to reorganize it to make it better to manage. Thankfully, because of the first time, I have tools now to deal with this kind of thing. I'm in the process of purging over 500 posts from the feed that are all dupes.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Update #1:

• All duplicate posts have been removed. I ensured to keep the highest scored thread first, breaking ties based on comment count, and then age.

Hey!

I've wanted to include shorts for some time, but doing so always seemed complicated. Then I discovered that there are some hidden RSS feeds on YouTube that I wasn't aware of. For your own education, here is how it works:

Every YouTube channel has an RSS feed, which looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=cid

Where the CID is the ID of the channel. However, you can also get RSS Feeds of playlists as well. It turns out that there are some hidden playlists. One for all uploads, one for long form uploads, one for short form uploads, and one for livestreams.

• All Uploads (default): https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=cid
• All Videos: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UUcid
• No Shorts (aka long form only): https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFcid
• YouTube Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UUSHcid
• Live Streams: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULVcid

Previously, I had a hard coded filter for shorts to exclude them from videos. This allows me to not only allow shorts, but silo them in their own community!

So, now we have !videos@news.abolish.capital and !shorts@news.abolish.capital.

On Lemmy, your default language is set in your profile. You might have set your language to "English" at some point, and in doing so were not able to comment on threads here, since the only language the comms allowed was "undetermined" which is the default language for all comms and accounts (to my understanding).

Sorry about that!

We've opened a new com for Green and Indigenous news! Check out !ecosocial@news.abolish.capital!

Hey ya'll!

So I've made a change to the posting procedure of the PravdaRSS bot. Instead of checking the list of feeds every few minutes, the bot now checks every hour. It will then queue those posts in its DB and post them over the course of the next hour.

Instead of getting 16 posts all created nearly instantly, you'll see them spread out across the hour. One post every 4ish minutes, instead of 16 posts in less than a minute.

I made this change based on feedback. Because of how it posted previously, some people would experience a wall of posts in their feed, pushing out other posts. This should ensure that news stories are more evenly distributed throughout the hour, and thus not taking up nearly an entire page in the feed.

I can always adjust the timer, make it pull every 2 hours for example, but every hour seemed like a good starting point.

Other updates: I've also implemented a proper user-agent for the system, which should result in fewer publications rejecting the bots attempts to check their feds.

Anyway, hope you all have a great holiday season and a great new year!

I pushed an update tonight that will start filling out the the post body with the full article text on many more feeds.

The next goal after this is to handle feeds that do not provide full text and pull them straight from the publication URL. I'll have to be careful to not be to aggressive when doing that task to avoid getting placed on a black list.