Self-Hosted RSS Aggregator

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Paft
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Self-Hosted RSS Aggregator

Post by Paft »

So with the collapse of a lot of major centralized services (Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc.) I've noticed that folks have started spreading out into multiple disparate areas again. I also noticed that I was spending more and more time trying to track them all down and keep up with them on a handful of separate sites.

So.

Turns out, if you're a self-hoster, there's a lovely web based RSS aggregator called FreshRSS. I've been having a blast with my own instance and even added an extension that lets me add sites like YouTube that would normally either not have, or hide, any RSS feeds they do produce. It makes things so much easier to just go to one place and follow along with everyone, even if I can't post from there - it's nice to have that central location to organize and follow everyone that matters without being flooded with the algorithmic BS of people I don't.

Highly recommended - if anyone happened to want to use my instance, I'm happy to share the URL for you to create an account with! Just drop a reply or PM if you want. Otherwise, setting up your own instance is *dead simple*.
So trade that typical for something colorful, and if it's crazy live a little crazy!
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Philip
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Post by Philip »

Interesting... It doesn't seem immediately apparent to me where it can aggregate from, I do see that there is Reddit, and a YouTube extension.. but do others like Twitter, Discord and Facebook offer customizable RSS feeds at all?
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Paft
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Post by Paft »

Twitter, yes, through the third party Nitter. That generates a native RSS feed, no RSS Bridge required.

Discord - Unsure. It's possible that a bot exists to turn a Discord channel (or set of channels) into an RSS feed; I haven't looked too much into it. I'd be wary about that considering how fast some of these servers run with hundreds or thousands of messages per hour; that would flood out any RSS aggregator I think.

Facebook yes - if the page is public. There's an RSS Bridge that exists that can turn public Facebook pages into an RSS feed for aggregators. If the page is private, though, you're SOL unless you want to dive into doing glorified screen scraping (which IS supported but is also complex as heck).

News sites can be grabbed through Google's own customizable RSS generation, too, so you can get stuff like AP or NPR that normally wouldn't have one. It really depends on what your needs are.



Edit: Fun fact, I have SpeedGuide as one of the RSS feeds. The forums. It's letting me keep more up to date on the posting here!
So trade that typical for something colorful, and if it's crazy live a little crazy!
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