1y ago

Introducing Lemmy.link

Hey Fediverse,

We've been working on something cool and wanted to share it with you. It's a new project called Lemmy.link, and it's all about making RSS feeds more accessible and useful on Lemmy.

We've noticed there's been a lot of talk in various communities about people shifting back to traditional RSS aggregators like Feedly, TT-RSS, and Newsblur. It got us thinking: why not bring those RSS feeds directly to Lemmy instead?

That's how Lemmy.link came to life. Right now, we have 10 communities collecting from over 30 RSS feeds, covering topics from World News and Technology to Business, plus some popular YouTube communities like News, Technology, and Explainers.

But we're just getting started, and this is where you come in. We'd love your ideas for new communities or RSS feeds to include. There's just one thing - to keep things running smoothly, we're focusing on shared interests and staying away from personal communities with custom feeds.

Also, please note, for now, lemmy.link is closed for signups. You'll need to subscribe from your current Lemmy instance. Once we've incorporated the upcoming 0.18.1 captcha update, we'll take a fresh look at this.

So, take a tour of Lemmy.link and let us know what you think. We believe there's huge potential for this project in the Fediverse and your input is a big part of that. Please provide any feedback on !meta@lemmy.link

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy what we've built so far with Lemmy.link.

-- Notorious

30 comments

First ... fuck yes!!
Second ... do you really need users on your instance?
Third ... I know you mentioned staying away from custom feeds ... but would it be on the horizon to construct feeds of multiple lemmy/kbin communities into a single lemmy community? I don't know how useful that would be, but seeing the "News" feed you've got immediately made me think the same could be done for the various News communities that have been started around the fediverse.
Yes, people can subscribe to all the communities they like ... but drilling down into a single community is a good way to make sure you don't miss something if the content is important to you. Having a single meta-RSS-community for a bunch that you like could be really helpful.
Obviously you don't want to be in the business of allowing anyone to create their own custom feeds ... but I'm sure there are at least a few that many would appreciate.
Fourth ... fuck yes!
- It makes me smile to see so many "fuck yes"s. Glad everyone is as excited as I was to launch it.
  I'm still debating allowing signups on my instance. That wasn't really the goal of this project and managing a Lemmy instance with a sizable user base isn't something I had in the scope of the project. More than likely it'll stay how it is, but I don't want to say I'll never allow signups.
  I've seen a lot of chatter about meta-communities to solve the fragmentation issue. Hopefully that is something the devs have on their roadmap. Think there are still a lot of bugs and performance issues they need to work out first.
  The few communities I have built were just the big ones I could think of to get to launch. I'm more than happy to build out new communities or add/change/remove feeds as people have feedback.
  Fuck yes!
  
  Fuck yes!
- Already subscribed to a few communities!

Nice idea, but pages over pages of crypo-scam articles as of right now is an instant no-go for me.
- That's just due to me adding the Crypto community at someone's request. It just backfilled all of the old articles. You can also just not subscribe to the crypto community if you don't want to see those posts.

oh I love the concept! It's like all of us looking at an RSS feed and talking about what's cool. Looking forward to trying it out, thanks for your hard work!
- That's the goal! If we can get enough subscribers to the communities the upvotes will cause the cream to rise to the top.

Great idea and project!
I am afraid you already have a bot problem.
- lol. ya that linkbot guy just doesn't stop posting.

Wow, I love this idea; I wish I’d thought of it!

This is a great idea, subbing to some of your communities now. Thanks!

Although I like the idea, unfortunately, automated posting without proper moderation puts all the mod work on federated instances admins?
- Since the posts are to my Lemmy.link server, all of the posts and comments will be on my server. The mod work will be on me to maintain.
  
  Monitoring 1.2k posts / day, sounds like a challenge

That's a great idea! Subscribed to some, thanks.
My suggestions / wishlist:
climate change
environment
ai development
Europe
reporting from conflicts/wars
news covering the fediverse (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, ...)
A sidenote: I noticed you made a few independent but identical announcements. I believe it is best practice to make one post, and cross-post from there.
- Thank you for the suggestions. I'll get them added to my todo list.
  Apologize if I ran afoul of any code-of-conduct. Haven't used the cross-post before and I wasn't sure if it would work across instances.
  
  added to my todo list.
  Awesome! Will check the communities again in the coming days.
  Apologize if I ran afoul of any code-of-conduct. Haven’t used the cross-post before and I wasn’t sure if it would work across instances.
  It's just my belief of a best practice, I'm not even sure this is a shared sentiment. So, no worries :D
  The advantage of cross-posting is, each post will have a list of all the other communities in which it was posted, cross-referencing each other. It works across instances.

How do you subscribe from your current instance?
- You'll need to search for the community. If you can't find it you can sometimes force your local lemmy instance to sync by going to yourlemmyinstance.com/c/space@lemmy.link

This is very cool, is the bot code published somewhere?

Very interesting. Kind of setting up discussion groups for the Lemmy community for articles that may not have their own. I’ll check it out.

So im new to Lemmy, how do I subscribe to this? I try going to a specific community, but I don't see a subscribe button. I just see submit a post.
- Click the magnifying glass in the top right corner next to your notifications. Make sure you are searching for "All". There appears to be some sort of bug where if you search for communities that it won't return anything. If you search "All" it'll find the community. Make sure to put in the actual name of the community you're wanting to find in this format: !community@server.url. You wan't to put in the actual community name, not the friendly name. In this example I'm searching for Youtube News (yt_news) on Lemmy.link.

Great idea! I managed to subscribe from my instance, but I keep getting this error: net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED. Am I doing something stupid?
- That appears to be an Android error. Might be a bug in the app or Lemmy instance you're on.
  
  Yep, the error occurs in Liftoff and Thunder, but Jerboa works.

Hmm that’s an impressive development! I’ll subscribe to your world news sub to give it a try. It’s heavy on UK sources and Al Jazeera, which is ok by me but what’s the makeup of your feed derived from? Can you share the method so others could do our own?
Their community link for World News if it saves you a click: !news_world@lemmy.link
- Every community has their feeds listed in the sidebar. That is actually how the bot is controlled. It looks up communities, scrapes any RSS feeds in the sidebar and then posts any unseen links to the community.

30 comments