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Comment on Show HN: RSS Brain

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Looks great! I have been actively reducing my blog and social media exposure and this might help clean up the remaining experience even more.

Somewhat tangential: does anyone know if there is a way to subscribe to the local timeline RSS feed (or even federated!) of a specific Mastodon instance? Individual users have RSS feeds but I could not find a timeline feed yet.

RSS support in Mastodon is extremely rudimentary.

What I'm missing even more is a single Atom or RSS feed for the people I follow from my account.

On Reddit my account specific feed can be found at an URL that looks like this: https://old.reddit.com/.rss?feed=SECRET&user=USERNAME

On Pinboard it's at: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:SECRET/u:USERNAME/

Adding a feed for every single person I follow to my feed reader (and manually keeping it in sync with what what my account actually follows) is not a solution that works.

Agreed! I assumed that that would be a more advanced feature but definitely would want that. Local timeline RSS should be an easy change (note to self: time to contribute!).

I don't think there is an RSS feed, but looks like there is a JSON endpoint: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/17269.

Even more tangential, I've been building an algorithmic digest of Mastodon (supports home, local, or federated) at https://fediview.com/. It might be interesting if you want a summary of Mastodon posts. Adding in RSS support might even be possible at some point.

Very cool! Makes me wish your solution was integrated into OP’s app (or vice-versa). This looks like the future of clean, customizable online content consumption.

One feature I would like to explore more is making algorithms completely customizable (as an advanced option perhaps). I.e. allowing changing all params manually in addition to being able to use your presets.

I don't have plan to support customize format in RSS Brain for now. But personally I use feeds from RSSHub (https://rsshub.app/) a lot. It's very easy to add a customizable feed to RSSHub (https://docs.rsshub.app/en/joinus/quick-start.html#submit-ne...).

About the cutomizable params, it would be more complex since that means each person's articles need to have difference scores, which multiplies the storage and computation a lot. But on some level the priority of articles is customizable: you can provide customized "upvotes" for each of the articles in a customized RSS feed (an example to provide these fields in RSSHub: https://docs.rsshub.app/en/joinus/quick-start.html#submit-ne...), which will affect the final sorting of the articles.

This project aggregating posts shut down quickly due to the backlash: https://mastinator.com

There are several expectations decreed by the community; for example: search has been specifically rejected.

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