I think that the biggest issue with Reddit, Lemmy, link aggregators in general is someone has to post the links. I want people to determine the sorting of the links, I want the system to facilitate commenting and engagement, but if I have to use an RSS reader AND Lemmy to get news, I’ll just use the RSS reader.

So my idea is, an instance which has communities which themselves subscribe to RSS feeds which auto populate the community. People then can subscribe to this from their lemmy instances, cross post, upvote, etc. idk how rss feeds would be voted on or added, but it’s just a concept.

Any ideas? Interest?

  • monerobull@monero.townEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Sounds like it would get filled up with overwhelming amounts of crap pretty quickly and on the server-side, refreshing a huge number of feeds would take a lot of resources.

  • EthicalAI@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Maybe a website which can turn any rss feed into a followable community? The first time someone requests it creates a new one, all future times it just subscribes you to the existing one. Then it would have a user bot that populares the RSS community.

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Well, you could say it already exists but it’s focused on reddit.
    lemmit.online you can check the code where it uses the RSS feed https://gitlab.com/sab_from_earth/lemmit/-/blob/develop/src/reddit/reader.py#L47

    I think it’ll be the same issue people have with this instance, lifeless posts which a lot of users will consider spam in the all feed since most sites are ad-revenue driven, so they post a lot just to see what actually sticks.
    Several of them only have one feed for all of their sections, so you end up with a feed of mixed interests which end up not interesting anyone.
    For me the idea of lemmy, and reddit, is to share interesting stuff which might provoke conversation, not all of what you find.

    For example, if there was one about TheVerge we’d have these posts:

    • There’s a lot of sci-fi streaming this summer: spam, I don’t care about it
    • The space telescope surveying the entire universe to understand dark matter and dark energy: interesting, might read, but will need to crosspost in a science related community to have meaningful conversation
    • Microsoft seems to think we’re getting a PS5 Slim this year: spam, I don’t care
    • Fortnite’s summer event has ice cream cones and cute lizards: spam, definitely I don’t care.
    • Netflix teases Japanese lineup full of zombies, robots, and pokémon: spam, I don’t care.

    I’d definitely unsubscribe from this feed and instead subscribe to something like !science@beehaw.org or !technology@beehaw.org to narrow down the articles I read.
    (Heck, I forgot about being subscribed to this feed since it rarely shows something interesting for me)

    I recommend you this approach, only use the RSS feeder to read your news and then post articles which you want to have a conversations about in appropriate communities.