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

  • nlm@beehaw.orgEnglish
    28·
    1 year ago

    I like the idea and to be honest it’s probably better with registrations turned off so that all posts would only be from rss sources.

    I’m definitely going to subscribe to a few of your communities!

    • NotoriousOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Great idea! Added it. Might take a couple minutes to refresh.

  • Briongloid@aussie.zoneEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Instance native community links

    If your instance has not yet had someone subscribe, you may still need to search for the community before its viewable to you.

    • renard_roux@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Links don’t work for me, I just get “Couldn’t find community” (I’m in Jerboa on Android).

      I tried searching for ‘yt_explainers’, nothing comes up. Tried searching for lemmy.link, same. Tried searching for ‘explaines’, no results. Any tips? 😕

      • herriott101@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’m on kbin.social and it doesn’t seem to working here even with the @.

        Maybe lemmy.link hasn’t been federated with kbin yet? Not sure exactly how it all works as I’m still pretty new.

            • Nick B.@beehaw.org
              1·
              1 year ago

              I have tried the search, for example !space@lemmy.link doesn’t return anything - but if I try @space@lemmy.link or space@lemmy.link I get the response not found. Maybe I need to wait longer for the search to query the remote instance @lemmy.link?

        • stown@sedd.it
          1·
          1 year ago

          Problem with kbib is that they don’t differentiate between an @bob “magazine” and an @bob user if you do @bob@kbin.website

    • NotoriousOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      We’ll get that one up here shortly.

      edit: and its now live. might take a couple minutes before the refresh runs.

  • mostlypixels@programming.devEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Great!

    I was compiling a list of news and magazines feeds. It’s far from complete, I don’t know if it can help but here is the opml.

    There is a lot of overlap between the feeds included because I grabbed the main feed and the categories wherever I could.

    • NotoriousOPEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      This is fantastic! Thank you!! I’ll work through the list and see what I can do.

    • NotoriousOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Absolutely! If you think of any others let me know.

  • livingcoder@lemmy.austinwadeheller.comEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    This is awesome! Thank you!

    I have a lot of interest in software development (and the Rust programming language specifically). Any plans to add a software development community? I don’t know of any feeds, though.

  • renard_roux@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    One of those things that sounds really cool and worth checking out, and then gets so complicated that it’s hard to bother because Lemmy, or possibly Jerboa, is too complicated (or the app’s not good enough).

    If I click the Lemmy.link link, it opens in an in-app browser window, so no subscribing to the communities available. Do I need to modify the URL somehow to make Jerboa understand the link is Lemmy compatible? If so, is there somewhere to do that?

    Thanks for sharing, and hope someone can help me understand how to get it working 😕

    • NotoriousOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yep. I was just trying to explain to my spouse how to subscribe to lemmy.link communities from their main instance. It is not intuitive at all. Unfortunately I don’t have an Android device, but if you go to the Communities tab on beehaw.org you should be able to search for the communities on lemmy.link.

      • renard_roux@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        That’s the conclusion I came to as well, except they’re not showing up 😕 Or at least not the Explainers one, haven’t actually tested the others. I’ll try again later, thanks for the suggestion 😃

          • renard_roux@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I figured it out!

            https://beehaw.org/c/yt_explainers@lemmy.link

            This allows me to see the external community, but still within the Beehaw context, so I’m still logged in and can subscribe to the external community 😃👍

            So the formula (that works for me) is:

            https://beehaw.org/c/[somecommunity@someinsta.nce]

            Of course, I’m still on desktop, so not sure if this would work in one of the apps — I’ll test now 👌

            Found the solution here: https://lemmy.one/post/81779

            Update: The new link works in neither Connect or Jerboa, but !yt_explainers@lemmy.link seems to work in Jerboa now, if properly wrapped in link markup.

            ~~Just tried again, this time on desktop, no dice 😔

            If I go to Search and type in ‘!yt_explainers@lemmy.link’, I just get two comments (yours included) from this thread as a result. If I go to lemmy.link, I don’t have an account so can’t subscribe.~~___

            • NotoriousOPEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I believe Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.link, however they haven’t said anything to me privately or publicly. The most recent post from a Lemmy.link community on Beehaw is over 3 days old. Beehaw is very serious about their curation/moderation and local communities, so I was not surprised to see them defederate. Unfortunately I think you’ll need to hop instances if you want to sub to any of Lemmy.link’s communities.

  • sukotai@beehaw.orgBEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    good idea : you can have a look to ‘beehaw’ instance comminities : it can be a good base for your project

    • NotoriousOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      That is a great idea… I’ll start looking into it. The hard part is finding quality RSS feeds that don’t post a bunch of junk.

      • sukotai@beehaw.orgBEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        yes, i began to test : some post are real advertising and are annoying. You should be more selective on the RSS sources

        • NotoriousOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yep. As I start to see which RSS sources are junk I’ll remove them and attempt to replace with better quality feeds. If you have any suggestions I’m all ears.

            • NotoriousOPEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Great catch! Can’t believe I didn’t already have that. I’ve added World News with BBC and Al Jazeera. Also added US News community with NBC and CBS US news feeds.

                • NotoriousOPEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  I initially went with Reuters, but their feed is a bunch of patting themselves on the back for breaking news. Maybe they have different feeds I can find. Did not think of AP, but I’ll get that one added because I agree that both are better (more neutral, fact based) sources.

      • sukotai@beehaw.orgBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        do you know you can also convert subreddit into RSS feeds ? don’t know if it will work after 1 july but it’s an option

        • NotoriousOPEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          I considered this, but really would prefer to stay away from Reddit feeds. That feels like we’re trying to bring Reddit to Lemmy and imho Lemmy should be its own thing. I could be persuaded if they keep RSS feeds around post-July 1st.

  • garrett@infosec.pubEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Do you have source for the bot? Curious to look under the hood. Great idea for an instance, though!

    • NotoriousOPEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I’m still actively working on it, but once it’s in a good place I’ll throw it up on GitHub and post it to !meta@lemmy.link

    • NotoriousOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      That’s definitely not the goal. My vision of this project was to simply combine Lemmy + RSS. You get the benefit of news stream from RSS with the community upvotes/downvotes and comments of Lemmy. I had initially tried to set up TT-RSS and Newsblur, but both of them were difficult to set up and this felt like a better solution. I’m also extremely open to adding communities and feeds as requested… absolutely not trying to curate news for people.

        • NotoriousOPEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Absolutely fair points and I already had the concern about being “fair and balanced”. The feeds I’ve added so far are either diverse (Youtube News is a great example: it contains both CNN and Fox News YouTube feeds) or are generally considered neutral (AP News and Reuters).

          When it comes to UFOs and religion I’d have no problem adding them, but would absolutely break those out into their own communities. If someone is super interested in UFOs then they are welcome to subscribe to the UFO community with like minded people. Ultimately I’m trying to keep the number of feeds per community fairly low and make sure they are on-topic.

          All that said I think it’s up to the community to upvote/downvote as they wish. That is really the power of link aggregators like Lemmy and Reddit. Crap gets downvoted into oblivion and the spicy nugs float to the top. Link aggregators do come with their own drawbacks (echo chambers and trolls to name two), but they are very powerful once you’ve found the right communities.

          Thank you for the well wishes! Sorry it’s not right for you, but I really appreciate the feedback to make sure I’m executing this properly.