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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Notorious@lemm.ee to c/technology@beehaw.org

77 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey Fediverse,

We've been working on something cool and wanted to share it with you. It's a new project called Lemmy.link, and it's all about making RSS feeds more accessible and useful on Lemmy.

We've noticed there's been a lot of talk in various communities about people shifting back to traditional RSS aggregators like Feedly, TT-RSS, and Newsblur. It got us thinking: why not bring those RSS feeds directly to Lemmy instead?

That's how Lemmy.link came to life. Right now, we have 10 communities collecting from over 30 RSS feeds, covering topics from World News and Technology to Business, plus some popular YouTube communities like News, Technology, and Explainers.

But we're just getting started, and this is where you come in. We'd love your ideas for new communities or RSS feeds to include. There's just one thing - to keep things running smoothly, we're focusing on shared interests and staying away from personal communities with custom feeds.

Also, please note, for now, lemmy.link is closed for signups. You'll need to subscribe from your current Lemmy instance. Once we've incorporated the upcoming 0.18.1 captcha update, we'll take a fresh look at this.

So, take a tour of Lemmy.link and let us know what you think. We believe there's huge potential for this project in the Fediverse and your input is a big part of that. Please provide any feedback on !meta@lemmy.link

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy what we've built so far with Lemmy.link.

-- Notorious

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[-] nlm@beehaw.org 29 points 2 years ago

I like the idea and to be honest it's probably better with registrations turned off so that all posts would only be from rss sources.

I'm definitely going to subscribe to a few of your communities!

[-] kensand@lemmy.kensand.net 14 points 2 years ago

What a coincidence, I just finished writing the first revision of my own bot for this. It's rough, but it works for me so far :)

https://github.com/kensand/rss-lemmy-bot

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago

You know what they say about great minds!

[-] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 2 years ago

I have an absolutely huge list of RSS feeds categorized out in TT-RSS, and split between full feeds and summaries. Might be useful for generating post body content. Let me know if you want it.

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

I would absolutely love to see it! The biggest hurdle so far has been finding quality RSS feeds.

[-] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 2 years ago

I will see if I can fire TT-RSS back up tomorrow.

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[-] val@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

combine efforts guys!!

[-] nlm@beehaw.org 13 points 2 years ago

You ought to have a space community!

For instance:

https://www.planetary.org/rss/articles

And a bunch of nasa related ones:

https://cosmologyandspace.wordpress.com/nasa-news/nasa-rss-feeds/#:~:text=Here%20are%20all%20the%20NASA%20RSS%20Feeds,that%20were%20list%20on%20their%20site%20at%3A%20http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nasa.gov%2Frss%2F%23.VR3GDRj3arU

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 4 points 2 years ago

Great idea! Added it. Might take a couple minutes to refresh.

[-] briongloid@aussie.zone 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Instance native community links

If your instance has not yet had someone subscribe, you may still need to search for the community before its viewable to you.

[-] topnomi@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

FYI, kbin needs it with an @ and without the !

Example: @space.
typed as @space@lemmy.link

[-] herriott101@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I'm on kbin.social and it doesn't seem to working here even with the @.

Maybe lemmy.link hasn't been federated with kbin yet? Not sure exactly how it all works as I'm still pretty new.

[-] nickb333@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

I am having a similar issue here at beehaw.org. I can't see anything from @lemmy.link listed in the communities.

[-] topnomi@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

It takes time to federate the content after you subscribe

[-] nickb333@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

I have tried the search, for example !space@lemmy.link doesn't return anything - but if I try @space@lemmy.link or space@lemmy.link I get the response not found. Maybe I need to wait longer for the search to query the remote instance @lemmy.link?

[-] stown@sedd.it 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Problem with kbib is that they don't differentiate between an @bob "magazine" and an @bob user if you do @bob@kbin.website

[-] topnomi@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I'm on kbin.social and it turns into a link

[-] herriott101@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

It seems to be working now.
When I search for @lemmy.link in magazines they all appear now, whereas before they didn't.

[-] briongloid@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago

Ahh that makes sense, been wondering the difference.

[-] renard_roux@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

Links don't work for me, I just get "Couldn't find community" (I'm in Jerboa on Android).

I tried searching for 'yt_explainers', nothing comes up. Tried searching for lemmy.link, same. Tried searching for 'explaines', no results. Any tips? 😕

[-] topnomi@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Try searching "!yt_explainers@lemmy.link"

[-] briongloid@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago

I have good luck usually by finding the original instance community html link and pasting into search, then waiting 15 seconds.

But getting the original html link is a little encumbersome.

[-] mostlypixels@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago

Great!

I was compiling a list of news and magazines feeds. It's far from complete, I don't know if it can help but here is the opml.

There is a lot of overlap between the feeds included because I grabbed the main feed and the categories wherever I could.

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago

This is fantastic! Thank you!! I'll work through the list and see what I can do.

[-] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 5 points 2 years ago

Cryptocurrency. You could bring together coindesk's rss feed, and bitcoin.com, etc

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

We'll get that one up here shortly.

edit: and its now live. might take a couple minutes before the refresh runs.

[-] knova@links.dartboard.social 5 points 2 years ago

Thank you for !space@lemmy.link !

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago

Absolutely! If you think of any others let me know.

[-] livingcoder@lemmy.austinwadeheller.com 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This is awesome! Thank you!

I have a lot of interest in software development (and the Rust programming language specifically). Any plans to add a software development community? I don't know of any feeds, though.

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

I've added a programming community with Stack Overflow's blog as a feed. I'll see what else I can come up with.

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[-] renard_roux@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

One of those things that sounds really cool and worth checking out, and then gets so complicated that it's hard to bother because Lemmy, or possibly Jerboa, is too complicated (or the app's not good enough).

If I click the Lemmy.link link, it opens in an in-app browser window, so no subscribing to the communities available. Do I need to modify the URL somehow to make Jerboa understand the link is Lemmy compatible? If so, is there somewhere to do that?

Thanks for sharing, and hope someone can help me understand how to get it working 😕

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

Yep. I was just trying to explain to my spouse how to subscribe to lemmy.link communities from their main instance. It is not intuitive at all. Unfortunately I don't have an Android device, but if you go to the Communities tab on beehaw.org you should be able to search for the communities on lemmy.link.

[-] renard_roux@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

That's the conclusion I came to as well, except they're not showing up 😕 Or at least not the Explainers one, haven't actually tested the others. I'll try again later, thanks for the suggestion 😃

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

I was able to get them all subscribed on my Beehaw account. You'd want to search for !yt_explainers@lemmy.link to find the community.

[-] renard_roux@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I figured it out!

https://beehaw.org/c/yt_explainers@lemmy.link

This allows me to see the external community, but still within the Beehaw context, so I'm still logged in and can subscribe to the external community 😃👍

So the formula (that works for me) is:

https://beehaw.org/c/ [somecommunity@someinsta.nce]

Of course, I'm still on desktop, so not sure if this would work in one of the apps — I'll test now 👌

Found the solution here: https://lemmy.one/post/81779

~~Just tried again, this time on desktop, no dice 😔

If I go to Search and type in '!yt_explainers@lemmy.link', I just get two comments (yours included) from this thread as a result. If I go to lemmy.link, I don't have an account so can't subscribe.~~

[-] myself33@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago

good idea : you can have a look to 'beehaw' instance comminities : it can be a good base for your project

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago

That is a great idea.. I'll start looking into it. The hard part is finding quality RSS feeds that don't post a bunch of junk.

[-] myself33@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

yes, i began to test : some post are real advertising and are annoying. You should be more selective on the RSS sources

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago

Yep. As I start to see which RSS sources are junk I'll remove them and attempt to replace with better quality feeds. If you have any suggestions I'm all ears.

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[-] garrett@infosec.pub 3 points 2 years ago

Do you have source for the bot? Curious to look under the hood. Great idea for an instance, though!

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago

I'm still actively working on it, but once it's in a good place I'll throw it up on GitHub and post it to !meta@lemmy.link

[-] coldhotman@nrsk.no 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

That's definitely not the goal. My vision of this project was to simply combine Lemmy + RSS. You get the benefit of news stream from RSS with the community upvotes/downvotes and comments of Lemmy. I had initially tried to set up TT-RSS and Newsblur, but both of them were difficult to set up and this felt like a better solution. I'm also extremely open to adding communities and feeds as requested.. absolutely not trying to curate news for people.

[-] coldhotman@nrsk.no 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[-] Notorious@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago

Absolutely fair points and I already had the concern about being "fair and balanced". The feeds I've added so far are either diverse (Youtube News is a great example: it contains both CNN and Fox News YouTube feeds) or are generally considered neutral (AP News and Reuters).

When it comes to UFOs and religion I'd have no problem adding them, but would absolutely break those out into their own communities. If someone is super interested in UFOs then they are welcome to subscribe to the UFO community with like minded people. Ultimately I'm trying to keep the number of feeds per community fairly low and make sure they are on-topic.

All that said I think it's up to the community to upvote/downvote as they wish. That is really the power of link aggregators like Lemmy and Reddit. Crap gets downvoted into oblivion and the spicy nugs float to the top. Link aggregators do come with their own drawbacks (echo chambers and trolls to name two), but they are very powerful once you've found the right communities.

Thank you for the well wishes! Sorry it's not right for you, but I really appreciate the feedback to make sure I'm executing this properly.

[-] coldhotman@nrsk.no 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023

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