Tentative: This forum's new topics on Mastodon

wet · 2024-01-03 10:48:48

Given the recent urge in the fediverse topic, I have taken advantage of the services of RSS Parrot and persuaded them to post new topics from this forum’s RSS feed to your Mastodon stream.

Just in case you follow it, of course: @forum.textpattern.com.by@rss-parrot.net.

This is unofficial and unsupported and uses a free service and… – you get the gist?

bici · 2024-01-03 22:06:23

wet wrote #336280:

Given the recent urge in the fediverse topic, I have taken advantage of the services of RSS Parrot and persuaded them to post new topics from this forum’s RSS feed to your Mastodon stream.

Just in case you follow it, of course: @forum.textpattern.com.by@rss-parrot.net.

This is unofficial and unsupported and uses a free service and… – you get the gist?

I am on the fediverse and have no idea on how to follow the rss feed

jakob · 2024-01-03 22:39:46

Nice idea :-) I tried following yesterday (using Mona) but it says my follow request is “pending”. Do I just need to wait or do we each need to first @birb forum.textpattern.com/ in a toot to be able to follow?

wet · 2024-01-04 00:14:58

Methinks that waiting will suffice. Here is a bit from the RSS parrot’s creator gábor ugray saying that “the first day has been overwhelming” which might indicate that resources may get exhausted …

maverick · 2024-01-04 13:45:47

Fwiw, I followed it a few minutes ago. No “pending” message.

jakob · 2024-01-04 19:24:16

maverick wrote #336287:

Fwiw, I followed it a few minutes ago. No “pending” message.

But does it work? Its profile still says “1 follower”.

I logged onto my instance in the browser this time but still have no luck. It looks at first like it works, but it doesn’t. This was my process:

Log onto my instance
Search for @forum.textpattern.com.by@rss-parrot.net and click on the profile in the results
Click on the “Follow” button. I now see an “Unfollow” button and the follower count says “2 Followers”.

However, it’s not added to my list of followers and the next time I visit the profile I see the “Awaiting approval” hourglass and a button with “Withdraw follow request”. I don’t see its posts in my timeline. If it works for you, could this be something to do with my instance?

bici · 2024-01-05 03:26:40

jakob wrote #336289:

But does it work? Its profile still says “1 follower”.

I logged onto my instance in the browser this time but still have no luck. It looks at first like it works, but it doesn’t. This was my process:

Log onto my instance

Search for @forum.textpattern.com.by@rss-parrot.net and click on the profile in the results

Click on the “Follow” button. I now see an “Unfollow” button and the follower count says “2 Followers”.

However, it’s not added to my list of followers and the next time I visit the profile I see the “Awaiting approval” hourglass and a button with “Withdraw follow request”. I don’t see its posts in my timeline. If it works for you, could this be something to do with my instance?

Thanks! This is the first post that plainly indicates how to follow. I am not surprised there are only three of us. Up to now it was all gobbledygook to me.

Destry · 2024-01-09 10:43:50

Jakob said:

could this be something to do with my instance?

That’s possible, but I’m not positive what the specific cause could be. I read somewhere that if an instance blocks bots, for example, it could interfere with something like this.

A lot of times someone new arrives in the fedi, sees it like a big open sandbox to make things for, but doesn’t understand the culture behind why it is the way it is. But they soon learn from a backlash if what they’re trying to build exposes people or their data. I’m not saying that’s happening here, but maybe the creator of Parrot didn’t understand the bot defense stance many instances take.

I’m also not implying my own position on the matter, just relaying what I’ve observed.

For example, every time there was a wave of new arrivals from twitter, there would be a million complaints about there not being a quote-post feature, which everyone had gotten used to using in twitter. But that feature was often abused in twitter (to call people out) and it was intentionally not included in Masto for that reason. Of course, some angry diehards get around it by screen-grabbing people’s posts and ‘sub-tooting’ that way without the original poster’s knowledge, and they do the same with tweets from twitter, which just show’s the problem that quote-post functionality leads to in microblogging platforms. But those people are often quickly blocked in the fedi by anyone annoyed by such twitter-like behaviour.

I have not missed the quote-post feature. It’s absence makes people more chill and better communicators, imo, and timelines a lot less polluted.

Another function that was intentionally not included was full-text search. Rather, search relied on use of hashtags only. Again this was to help ‘protect’ early users of Masto from stalkers and doxxing and whatnot. But again, as more twitteriti arrived and complained about a lack of search, masto eventually added it as an opt-in preference, which seems like a fair way of handling it.

Masto is still evolving, edging over closer to what the masses scream about, but still trying to give more control to users over privacy and data. Admin of instances play a big role in this by way of what they set at the gates, too. Which is good, and why people move around until they find a good place to camp.

bici · 2024-01-09 18:03:55

I now see that there is a number of new followers. the latest rss feed is the one on “Making nested lists”.

forum.textpattern.com.byrss-parrot.net

jakob · 2024-01-10 21:51:49

This has started working for me too. I needed to withdraw my follow request and then refollow, and this time it stuck. I’m seeing new posts in the timeline too. Perhaps something to do with the rssparrot updates two days ago?

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