Hacker News Reader

RSS feeds that don't contain the full article text drive me nuts.

Here is a workaround that I've had good luck with:

https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/

In addition to improving usability, it defeats attempts to measure clickbait summary efficacy, etc., since it breaks sites' ability to pull popularity / telemetry info.

I have used Diigo for a long time in a similar way - bookmarks are useless, and I only remember the sentences in the links I’m after, not the url, plus tagging them.

This seems like a much cleaner setup and can feed into indieweb as well.

Thanks for sharing, I wouldn’t have gone looking for this.

Diigo is great - a web 2.0 sites that has just kept chugging along - and way underrated.

The outliner[0] feature allows you create someting similar to notado.

[0] https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start

If somebody from Diigo is reading this: Why is there no content on the frontpage? It's a sleeping social network that could generate many more subscriptions.

The Organize section could be like https://ooh.directory/

The Share section could offer a feed of all content that users are willing to share publicly. There could be support for ActivityPub to make it a worthwhile investment of time.

It should be a better sales channel to get new users hooked on good content first instead of forcing them to commit to a new account before trying anything.

Diigo is really under rated

They went down once in many years and I couldn’t use the web until it was back up.

>I also added the ability for my RSS subscribers to comment on RSS items from my feed using their Mastodon accounts

How does it work? Looking at a feed.rss file, I don't see any links to Mastodon posts.

>I curate RSS feeds on specific topics

>I think this is a real sweet spot. I cannot go back to feeds of anything and everything, a hodge-podge mixture of bad one-paragraph summaries or overwhelmingly long RSS item bodies.

It is the sweet spot when it comes to consuming your feed on its own. In the context of other feeds, and you may have resolved it with Mastodon feedback, it still takes some time to find the best links in your feed. That's a quality on its own, so please don't feel pressured for change. However, these points would make it sweeter for me:

* Showing the most popular highlights of the week, month and year, by user vote and by the popularity of the main article on social networks, as well as your personal favorites.

* Find like-minded collectors who have included the same highlight or for further drill-down, a set of highlights.

* It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate. Further tags that could be used for sorting and ranking would also be nice.

> How does it work?

It uses a "just in time" model to create a Mastodon post if it doesn't already exist when a user clicks on the "Comment" link (it also does a bunch of other stuff to handle truncation, fitting within the submission limits of the instance, making space for source links etc).

I think it's important to try and be a good citizen on Mastodon instances run by volunteers and minimize unnecessary load. The reality is that not everyone is going to want to comment on every single item in a feed, so in my mind there is no point trying to having a 1/1 parity between RSS items and Mastodon points.

Comments initiated by subscribers are posted on Mastodon with the "unlisted" visibility so they don't spam the public discoverability features in the instance timeline, but can be boosted by the curator at their discretion. The commenting user can also boost the highlight on their instance if they wish.

> It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate.

I do this sometimes[1] - curators have an option to post a highlight directly to the public feed of their instance (ie. not unlisted), and then reply to that themselves with notes.

I think I'm a little overdue in writing a blog post about this new feature! Stay tuned for a submission on HN hopefully sometime in the next week!

[1]: https://hachyderm.io/@LGUG2Z/109479665631086833

I will wait for your post, but if you want to know what is still unclear to me:

>>for my RSS subscribers

>It uses a "just in time" model to create a Mastodon post

What is 'It'? notado.app for people who have logged in? There is no links to comments when not logged in. How can new users or people who don't want to create an account discover the comments?

>no point trying to having a 1/1 parity between RSS items and Mastodon points.

To me, the interesting part would be an n/1 relation: One comment section where everybody from all RSS streams can meet to discuss an article. Like HN/new, there is no incentive to comment on a 3 day old post because hardly anybody will read it. The economics change if the comment section can appear on various RSS streams because then, there can be readers and replies to a comment even years later.

Is it acceptable or even desirable to share your mastodon comment sections, or do you see them as a place for the people who follow you?

> How can new users or people who don't want to create an account discover the comments?

The links to initiate new comments on the public HTML versions of the feeds show only for people who are logged in, because unfortunately bots and scrapers are not as respectful as they should be.

As a user's feed homepage is designed to be shared publicly, it only takes one bad actor to click on every "Discuss on Mastodon" link for every item in all of a curator's feeds and put undue load on a Mastodon instance which makes the whole "just in time" approach moot.

Where Mastodon posts have already been created for discussion (by authed users, or by any users subscribed directly to the RSS versions of the feeds), those links (ie. to the Mastodon posts) get shown on the public HTML versions of the feeds.[1]

Otherwise, anyone who subscribes to the public RSS version of the feed (unauthed by default, doesn't require an account etc.) is presented with a "Discuss on Mastodon" link at the end of each RSS item on any feed for which the curator decides to enable comments, and this link can be used to initiate new comments/discussions with a Mastodon identity.

> One comment section where everybody from all RSS streams can meet to discuss an article

This isn't really something I'm interested in for Notado, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone sees your comment and runs with this idea!

> The economics change if the comment section can appear on various RSS streams because then, there can be readers and replies to a comment even years later.

It's not quite the same as what you're suggesting, but I am thinking of providing an API for https://kulli.sh where article authors can embed comments on their articles from across all supported platforms at the bottom of their articles. This could go a long way towards keeping discussions fresh regardless of the time that passes since the initial submission due to comments being embedded with the source.

I just need to really sit down and work out a pricing model (or maybe separate models for individuals vs organizations) for the whole thing.

> Is it acceptable or even desirable to share your mastodon comment sections, or do you see them as a place for the people who follow you?

I think this depends entirely on the curator. I personally don't have any issues with mine being shared more widely, but there are settings that I've made available to allow people to restrict comments to approved followers (on Mastodon).

The nice thing about the Mastodon API is that if you enable public comments, you can filter for your posts that have been created by the "Notado Feeds" OAuth app, and then filter again by posts that have >N replies, and then embed those discussions on your personal website (or anywhere else).

[1]: Example here that you can see when unauthed https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development#399920c89...

You definitely have thought this through. Is there a reason that you don't have a page with the posts with >N replies, or the posts with the most recent replies, available on the notado.app?

I prefer the substack model personally: full article with a link to the substack at the top and bottom. I feel a bit yanked around otherwise, speaking for myself anyway