Show HN: Using Mastodon as a RSS Reader
thejunkland.com
thejunkland.com
Darius has a very interesting reasoning on why the service isn't available to everyone: it is too easy to spam, overload and in general do harm on upstream websites. I tend to agree with him, and I'm not sure this project has elements to convince me otherwise. But if I'm wrong, all the better !
For a positive reference I love how simple https://bird.makeup (a Twitter to Mastodon bridge) is; that's the UX that I wanted to replicate with Mastofeeder.
IMO Mastofeeder is as easy to abuse as any other Mastodon server (or spinning your own), so I wanted to make the service to be as easy for legitimate end users as possible.
And there's always technical measures to implement if I start seeing abuse: Throttling requests, limiting maximum feeds per users etc
I am also thrilled by how nice bird.makeup ux is, although it's a bit unnerving to go to an account from your mastodon client, click on the "open in browser" and land on the homepage, not the page of the Twitter user. I'd hope it would give me the last few tweets, and the same for mastofeeder.
> IMO Mastofeeder is as easy to abuse as any other Mastodon server (or spinning your own)
That's the thing, reading RSS should be extremely simple but the ActivityPub way means there is a mandatory gateway, and that gateway is then too easy to abuse. My issue is not necessarily with mastofeeder per se but with the high burden such a gateway means, and the power imbalance that comes from it.
But even though I may sound negative, I really like your project ! Thanks for doing this for the community !
EDIT: Never mind, it's just slow. Some constructive criticism: maybe make the posts not public, so they don't flood the federated timeline at creation?