rss.ponder.cat is live! You can have Lemmy communities fed by RSS news feeds:

A lot of big sites offer feeds for different categories of article, but I’m not sure it is smart to mirror every single one into a Lemmy community. The ones above, for periodicals like the BBC, are only the front page stories, which seems necessary for it not to turn into spam.

The Ars mirror, on the other hand, I broke down by category, at least partly. You can get all the articles:

Or, you can subscribe to individual categories of articles:

I’ll see how it goes. I don’t want it to become a source of spam.

If you want to have an RSS feed as a community, ask. They’re easy to add. Just say something and I’ll set it up.

Happy RSSing!

  • OtterAEnglish
    101·
    4 months ago

    Very cool! I agree about avoiding most of the sub feeds.

    If you don’t mind, could you add some Canadian news providers?

    Not news, but if you think it might be nice, webcomics:

    You may need an RSS feed detector for some of these. I don’t see a button on the site for a few, but I added them somehow a few months ago.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPEnglish
      5·
      4 months ago

      I added [email protected] and [email protected] for you.

      I know there’s already [email protected] and I wouldn’t want to duplicate that community. @[email protected] do you want me to set up an RSS bot to post new comics to the existing lemmy.world community? If one doesn’t already exist? It’s easy to configure the RSS bot to post comics to a designated community for them, and I think that’s better than setting up a duplicate community.

      • OtterAEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        Forgot to say thanks yesterday, it looks good!

        That makes sense to me about XKCD :) There’s also [email protected] for some of the other ones

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPEnglish
          3·
          4 months ago

          Yep. I’m happy it’s working.

          Comic strips seem like they have their own communities which I don’t want to collide with, and it’s logical, since the frequency of posting is so much smaller that a human can do the postings no problem.

    • OtterAEnglish
      5·
      4 months ago

      A more general thought/suggestion:

      Have a general support community that people can post in, and pin a post from it on the instance so people know where to post with requests and ideas. You could also include a link to the communities page or some other list of all communities that are available. It could help with discoverability

      Also feel free to cross post to [email protected]

  • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Interesting project!

    A lot of big sites offer feeds for different categories of article, but I’m not sure it is smart to mirror every single one into a Lemmy community

    One problem I forsee with bot-only communities is a lack of discussion. Would it be possible to direct one of these subfeeds to an existing Lemmy community not on rss.ponder.cat? (with the approval of the community of course)