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.
@twilliability Can your parrot recognise a signal in the source feed that shows that the feed owner already has a mastodon account and reply to users with a link to that account instead of the parrot account?
@kellogh@twilliability talking of chronological timelines… Tim, you announced Fossil right before I went on vacation, and I completely missed it. There’s really cool stuff happening here with both Birb, and Fossil - thanks for sharing!
@kellogh I just rediscovered RSS & apart from feeds which are by design or for me read-only, I'm finding it invaluable to (a) keep track of my must-read people (& click through if I wish to read or join a Fediverse conversation), (b) to index my own posts on Mastodon so that I can relocate them without endless scrolling! (My instance does not yet have search options - & the RSS reader is fast.) @twilliability #RSS#Elasticsearch#OpenWeb
@twilliability My first enhancement request: for RSS feed entries with media attachment(s), the post should include the media attachment? E.g. https://rss-parrot.net/web/feeds/miniature-calendar.com has no images, but when I look at the feed in my RSS reader I see images (and also tags, but that might be too much).
@twilliability Thanks so much! The one thing I found as a newbie to Mastodon is that it wasn't obvious how to follow the Library of Congress Maps blog stream as it said " Parroting since January 7, 2024 as @blogs.loc.gov.maps" but if it had said " Parroting since January 7, 2024 as @blogs.loc.gov.maps@rss-parrot.net" instead it would have been more obvious. But thanks again!
@twilliability Awesome job! I was hoping someone would build something like this for a long time. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work on Catodon, maybe @panos has an idea?
@twilliability@panos No response and I can't follow @birb (stuck on processing). I wouldn't be surprised if this is the same for other *key apps, since I had similar issues in the past.
@twilliability@wernie@birb yes, and we're basically more or less on the same codebase as firefish, so if it works here, it will work on firefish as well. Mentioning our lead dev too @namekuji
@twilliability@birb This is exactly what I'm looking for, but the UX is pretty terrible. THe bot can clearly handle direct messages but it just refuses to for some unknown reason. It very much looks like a dark pattern to me.
@miki@twilliability@birb This is the kind of feedback that makes no one want to work on new things: immediately labeling the UX of a "beta" RSS application as terrible 7 hours after its initial release and calling what is potentially a small oversight a "dark pattern", which is objectively a very negative phrase to label a situation that is likely not even insidious or attempting to hoodwink users privacy at all. Why not just make a suggestion instead of coming in hot like this?
@tristan@twilliability@birb This is clearly not an oversight. It would be an oversight if the bot straight up ignored DMs. The bot is specifically coded so that it replies to DMs, telling you that DMs aren't supported. I find it very hard to believe doing that was less work than actually making DMs handled correctly.
@miki@twilliability@birb The service is open source. I can't see a reason that they chose to deny DMs upon quickly glancing through, but I would assume best faith interpretation until otherwise indicated. It's possible that it's just an artificial way to throttle down on people spamming, since folks will be obligated to air their RSS feeds in some kind of public venue. It'd be lovely to have a bit more privacy here, but I still sincerely doubt this is done intentionally to harm.
Hello I think this is a really wonderful idea and I am very excited to use it!
Not sure if this is helpful but I found an issue.
Testing with the same feed, posts load into Mastodon, but they do not appear to load into other fediverse software. Tested with Mastodon, Firefish, and Sharkey.
@twilliability@birb Fun protocol demonstration. Has anybody built loops yet or do you white list? As an application, it feels backwards to me, because it centralizes feed aggregation that can easily be done on the client, where I believe it belongs. I.e. I am reading a bunch of feeds including Mastodon with #evolutionMail 's RSS integration.
I’d also love the favicon (or even better the high quality apple-touch-icon thingy) as the user avatar to differentiate feeds. (I imagine you’ve already thought of this!)
@twilliability@birb This is cool! But... Seems like a lot of work for the birb server to support all those feeds for the whole #fediverse ? Additional accounts for each sub feed of a popular site? It would be cool for Mastodon servers to provide an RSS feed for my timeline, so I could plug that into my feed reader!
@twilliability yah. It turns out, Mastodon server already provides an RSS feed for each user, so I could, in theory, add all the feeds in my follow list to my reader and reconstruct my timeline. I don't think they provide feeds for hashtags right now, so maybe still some server work to do... But that would be a lot of feeds for theMastedon server to support! Better to have one feed per user for that user's whole timeline. I will pitch it to them!
@twilliability How quickly should we get a response? I tried this last night, and several times (from a couple different clients) this morning, and have no responses, and nothing's showing up in the master feed list.
I can see other people's parroted feeds -- I'm just not sure my request is getting to the bot.
@twilliability@jerry I just tried this from an account on a different server and got an immediate response. So for some reason, this account (on infosec.exchange) isn't making it through.
@darthnull@twilliability I suspect it is because I had authorized_fetch enabled. I just turned it off - can you try it again to see if that is indeed the problem?
@darthnull@twilliability it would be super helpful if whomever maintains that service can fix it to be compatible with authorized_fetch. In time, it’ll work with next to no instances otherwise.
@twilliability is it closed source, will it stay so? Is it free, will it stay so? What data does it collect? Obviously websites addresses and RSS Flux, does it keep a link to the profile making the request?
@twilliability Very cool. I tested with a site and it replied, but the account appears to not have been generated. Listed on your web page but account link is a 404.
@twilliability@birb Amazing! This finally revived the thing I liked most about Google Reader - the ability to follow both feeds and people in the same place, and to have people who follow me be alerted to things in my RSS feeds that they don't follow that I have starred.
Gonna start importing my Inoreader feeds right now!
In "Moderated servers" section, look for "Third-party bots". At the moment they blocked 77 domains.
For the reason, I think they want only "real" content from "real" people with an account.
Not that I agree with that, I am saying Mastodon is not about freedom for years: people are held hostage by big servers without knowing it i.e. Mastodon itself is a mini-Web with the same centralization issues.
Another project, MastoFeeder, didn't handle ATOM or query strings (?this=that&the=other). Folks directly requested new feeds by hand-editing usernames, so MastoFeeder never got to see unmangled urls. https://github.com/jehna/mastofeeder
OpenRSS is a service that generates RSS for arbitrary sites. Mitigated the shortcomings. Parrot doesn't have those limitations but may benefit for sites lacking feeds. https://openrss.org/
The thing that has been driving me crazy about RSS lately is that Feed Rinse, the circa 2000 RSS filter, has been having server issues and is letting tremendous quantities of previously filtered posts through into my feed. I want a effective and up-to-date feed filter. Do you know of any?
Add comment