tunetardis

A better RSS experience

I've been playing around with RSS views of the fediverse hoping to get something comparable to multireddits, but there is a problem.

First of all, it is possible to get reddit feeds on both kbin and lemmy. The URLs look like:

https://KBIN_INSTANCE/rss?magazine=MAGAZINE_NAME
https://LEMMY_INSTANCE/feeds/c/COMMUNITY_NAME?sort=new

Unfortunately, these are problematic when dealing with instances that are not your home instance. Any links to the post page will be absolute remote instance URLs, which means you cannot interact with the post (e.g. leave a comment). The URL really needs to be made relative to your home instance for that to work, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to fix that for a specific post. I can only fix the URL to the magazine/community itself and then hope to locate the post within it again.

If there is a way to get home instance-relative RSS feeds, I'm all ears! Failing that, I might work on a scraper that can take URLs of the form:

https://KBIN_INSTANCE/m/MAGAZINE_NAME@REMOTE_INSTANCE
https://LEMMY_INSTANCE/c/COMMUNITY_NAME@REMOTE_INSTANCE

and generate RSS feeds out of them? But I don't want to reinvent the wheel if something like this is already possible?

It might also be useful to someone trying to write an app with a multireddit-type feature? I will definitely release source if I come up with anything.

EDIT: fixed a typo in URLs

#RedditMigration

Can the fediverse really scale?

I'm thinking about kbin/lemmy here, but my understanding is that every instance has to maintain a copy not just of the magazines/communities it hosts but also every other one its users subscribe to? So in a worst case scenario, the storage requirements would grow in sort of an N-squared fashion, would they not? If all of reddit wound up here, that's a lot of storage.

I guess the idea is that a smaller instance would only have to manage some subset of magazines of interest to its membership. But all it would take would be some bots sneaking in there and subscribing to everything, sort of like the kid who hits every button on the elevator.

I'm not sure what the solution is? I think it's good to have more than one copy of any given magazine/community kicking around in case its host instance goes dark/defederates/whatever. But maybe there is some sort of middle ground? Like perhaps a somewhat torrent-like scheme for backup where instances can contribute as much storage/bandwidth as is realistic for them? I'm not sure how that would work, but you would somehow want to ensure that there are a few redundant copies of every community distributed across all instances. And of course an instance could still go on caching the more active communities for practical reasons.

#RedditMigration