What do you guys think of rss.ponder.cat?
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I like it, I have seen some people complaining that its spam.
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I wasn't really familiar with it before this post. Seems it is just an instance full of bots relaying RSS feeds to Lemmy? I think that can certainly be useful, but I also think the structure of Mastodon is more suitable for reading RSS feeds than that of Lemmy, so I think I'm going to keep reading RSS feeds through https://rss-parrot.net/ (and sometimes post things to appropriate Lemmy communities if I think more people should see them).
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I like it for content discovery, but it feels weird to upvote bot posts. When I see something interesting enough to comment on I do try to see if there’s a similar article in a better community already or make cross-post.
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If it, or some other service, could find a way to publish feeds of content for sites which don't have RSS feeds, now that would be really useful.
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That would require web scraping, which is easy enough to do on a news website, but it would require work for each individual site.
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Yes I know, I literally do it myself with a Python script right now for 3 sites. I just wish someone would generously provide a hosted and maintained service that does this. IMO it could be a game changer. For some people a single source that lacks a feed is a deal breaker for RSS.
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Yeah sorry, by "you" I really meant "one". If someone doesn't like it, they can block the instance
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It works well and is easy enough to ignore if you don't like it.
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I like it, it's nice to be able to bring RSS News feeds automatically into the Fediverse, and if people don't like it they can just ignore or block the communities.
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I think bots that just repost stuff suck the life out of the platform. It's not organic sharing, you get EVERYTHING posted by the source website.
I'm actually really shocked at how accepted bots are here when it feels so antithetical to what the userbase generally stands for.
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Why so? It's easy to block bots that have their accounts tagged as such. I block them myself, but I have no problem with them existing.
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The underlying problem is that Lemmy only offers Subscribed vs. All, and the former starts off entirely empty while the latter is... EVERYTHING.
PieFed solves this by a wizard that guides a new user to pick what their interests are and thereby subscribes them to many communities based on those. On top of that, Categories of Communities allow seeing any content that you choose - e.g. if 9/10ths of the time you want to avoid politics so you subscribe to none, but then that 1/10th you actually do want it... it's there for you. Instantly. And then goes away again just as quickly.
Some Lemmy apps do this as well - I don't know which ones - but base Lemmy does not.
So anyway, it's a UI/UX issue, but fundamentally a bot that at least is properly labeled as such is friendly enough, especially in comparison to all other media platforms where they masquerade as real people to pretend like there's more engagement than there actually is, and thereby boost advertising income.
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I do block them but like I said, they feel like the complete opposite of what social media sites like this are....a social site.
It's all about the comments section and with a bot, there is no OP to talk to.
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Someone could make a script that does that every now and then.
Check for any communities made since the last run, and add those to the list
