Under-the-radar late night launch: RSS Parrot is live! It talks like Mastodon, but it doesn't walk like Mastodon. BUT! It will relay any RSS feed straight into your timeline.
Turn Mastodon into your very own feed reader. Follow anything that has an RSS feed and get a toot about new posts.
How? Mention @birb with the address you want to follow.
I guess this is turning into a real project so putting this out there if anyones interested:
We're making a very lightweight tool to create RSS feeds for journals from crossref metadata (with room for other sources). If ya dont know, many publishers are shutting down their RSS feeds to drive people onto their surveillance platforms, and every enshittification leaves behind an opening for adversarial interop.
This opens some interesting possibilities like creating feeds for keywords indexed across journals to start breaking down journals as the major organizational scheme of scholarly lit - papers have metadata keywords, but they mostly arent used, so lets use them!
Eventually wed like to write a FastAPI plugin similar to activitypub-express so we can make all feeds available on the fedi as well, and that would be a really nice set of tools to build for smaller AP projects that dont necessarily want to be full instances.
This is designed to be extremely deployable so you can run your own feed generator, but we'll also host a reference instance here at feeds.neuromatch.social once we get it running.
Just getting started, help wanted and welcome from anyone who loves #RSS and reading papers ♥
Why do some websites not have one or more #RSS feeds. Do they feel they will get more traffic forcing people to visit their site everyday? Is it ad related? Not sure how to implement? Perhaps just don’t know about RSS feeds (feeds are old school right?)
First off, @evan sees this from the perspective of someone who's co-authored #ActivityPub. It's his job to spur and enable adoption -- and that's something he's done exceptionally well for 20 years. Of course he wants to help Meta abide by open standards. Which, even if you dislike Meta, you would hope they would do.
My perspective is as one who is building products that compete with Meta. Ideally, I would like people who use Meta to migrate away from there and instead use #Calckey, #GreatApe, and the numerous options available on #SpaceHost.
But even from the perspective of a competitor, I want interoperability with #Barcelona. And even more, I want interoperability based on open standards.
Yes, yes, yes -- "embrace, extend, extinguish". At this point, that phrase is a broken record.
But every time that phrase comes up, I keep asking folks: when has the "extinguish" part of "embrace, extend, extinguish" ever worked?
People say #RSS, but RSS is still here and I use it every day. Hell, Calckey even has an RSS widget and it works like a charm. RSS is not extinguished.
People also say #XMPP, but I can run an XMPP server right now -- no problems. People say XMPP "died" because it's no longer as popular now, but is it because Meta and Google dropped support, or is it because Slack, Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, and even Matrix have come along to eclipse it in popularity? Regardless, even if XMPP is no longer so popular, it's not extinguished.
The most ludicrous example of "extinguish" people bring up is Gmail's dominance of email. But email is the most popular communications technology we have today, even though it's 50 years old. What's more, look at the raw stats. Gmail is only 18% of the email server market -- that's no monopoly. Go have a look at the stats for yourselves:
The pessimistic notion that we will "lose" by allowing Meta to interoperate with ActivityPub -- again, an open standard -- just doesn't convince me. In fact, if Meta is adopting standard ActivityPub, I think "losing" is impossible.
With Meta adopting ActivityPub, we're not losing. We're winning. We're not conceding to Meta by adopting their proprietary APIs for interoperability. They're conceding to us by adopting ActivityPub.
Again, I'm not saying you should all federate with #Barcelona. I'm saying that Meta adopting an open standard that allows for interoperability is a win because, remember, they're adopting our standard. We're not adopting theirs.
Some also ask, "But what if Meta does a bait-and-switch and drops ActivityPub support?"
Well, there's kind of precedence for that.
Not enough people realize this, but Google once adopted the predecessor of ActivityPub. Specifically, they used OStatus for Google Buzz. Certainly, like many Google products, Google Buzz shuttered.
But the development for an open social media protocol lived on, and we all use what was developed right now.
No doubt, if Barcelona becomes Meta's Google Buzz, ActivityPub will live on. It will still be developed. We'll keep using it.
In the meantime, I'll consider ways to help Meta users migrate to platforms that I believe are better.
Does anyone here use Reeder 5? I'm giving RSS feeds a try and am having problems with the “Subscribe with Reeder" extension in Safari.
For example, if I try to sub to the NintendoLife news feed by clicking on the Reeder extension, it gives me a “server not found" error and only picks up the standard non-feed URL of “https://www.nintendolife.com/news”
Vous vous souvenez des flux #rss, ces vieux machins un peu passés de mode? Sachez que ça pourrait être un formidable outil de veille, de recherche sur le fédiverse. Tout ici peut être rssable ! Vous en avez marre de scroller à la recherche d'un pouet posté il y a qques jours? Avec un lecteur de flux rss, dorénavant, vous récupérerez tous vos pouets. Suffit de rajouter .rss à l'adresse affichée par votre navigateur. Hashtag, compte, fil spécifique, ça marche avec (presque) tout. #astuce#tips
I love #RSS. My RSS feed reader is the page I visit most on web, I think. So it's very frustrating when folks update their site, but don't redirect their RSS feed - please remember to do it, people. https://kevquirk.com/dont-change-your-rss-url
Ouais, j'en veux beaucoup à Mozilla d'avoir retiré, il y a quelques années, l'affichage automatique de l'icône RSS de Firefox quand un flux est détecté dans une page.
#android#rss
Jusqu'à présent je consultais mon instance FreshRSS via le web. Je me suis décidé à installer une appli Android.
Après quelques essais, celle qui me convient le mieux est Readrops.
Simple, pratique, efficace, moderne, pas d'espace gaspillé à l'écran.
J'ai juste un bricolage maison dans Automate pour déclencher la mise à jour des flux (je ne voulais pas l'automatiser côté serveur).
So, I wanted to do a client-site embed of my #Mastodon#RSS feed via #XSLT into a page of my website, without using #JavaScript, but I'm having serious doubts that this is possible at all … anybody had any luck with this? #askFedi#fediHelp
Auch wenn #Mastodon keine algorithmische #Timeline hat, gibt es gute Möglichkeiten, die interessantesten/beliebtesten/besten(?) Beiträge darin leicht zu finden:
Can #podcasting be made to work with #ActivityPub as well as #RSS? Then podcatchers could work like a #Mastodon client, allowing us to interact directly via comments, favorites and spreading around the best episodes via boosts. #podcasts
update: it exists but no podcatcher fully supports it yet.