Hi,

I generally manually post articles of sites that I think are interesting to the fediverse by hand. For most RSS feeds this is the only practical way to do it as it’s never “guaranteed” that an article from a site is going to be about a specific topic. For example, anime news network posts aren’t always about anime, etc etc.

However, there’s a general interest I have in trying to adapt both RSS feeds (and, maybe later, news letters) to automated posts on specific categories on lemmy for certain communities where it’s easy to do this. News posts for specific games (think steam RSS update feeds) and the like.

So the questions I have are:

  1. Are there any open source projects that are designed to integrate with piefed with a bot user handle by subscribing to RSS feeds?
  2. Does anyone actually employ this on their end and what does it look like?
  3. Could RSS subscriptions be a per-community feature (depending on the instance)?

Thanks!

  • Rimu@piefed.socialMEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Yes the latest release of PieFed includes this functionality.

    https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2285233/piefed-v1-7-11-is-released-finding-and-adding-people-to-follow-posts-from-rss-feeds-and

    For example, !aljazeera_rss@crust.piefed.social

    It is off by default (most instances will not want to be a source of so many bot posts) but if you make an account on crust.piefed.social you can make some communities and add feeds into those communities. BTW right after you add the feeds the community will be empty - only new RSS content from that point on will be added as posts.

    You could check with the piefed.zip admins to see if they plan to turn this on or not.

    I’m still working out the kinks - !bbc_rss@crust.piefed.social doesn’t work yet for some reason. Hopefully will be fixed this weekend.

    • leann@piefed.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Neat! I should check it out. Sorry to make a post about this when I could have just checked the release notes first. 😇

      Yeah I figured it would have to be enabled on a per-instance basis or for there to be controls on RSS feed posts (for example, make them ephemeral and local only until mods have approved them with an upvote)) as you wouldn’t want it to be a source of spam.

      • Rimu@piefed.socialMEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Oh yes, re: ephemeral - the retention policy for a community has to be set by an instance admin so wherever you have your rss communities will involve getting an admin to set that for you, once you’ve created them all.