confusedcharlot

Charlotte the Useless Ghost

@confusedcharlot

Transitioning in mid-life

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jkap
@jkap

NOW LIVE: RSS feeds!

we're now publishing an RSS feed (and a JSON feed!) for every page on cohost! we're setting the relevant <link rel="alternate" /> tags on profile pages, so you can just put the page URL into your feed reader to subscribe!

there's a couple things that we haven't made final decisions on (namely: there's still some open questions about how we display shares), and we're open to any feedback you have there.

we're planning to add RSS feeds for tag pages at a later date as well.

thanks for using cohost!

note for users that were on the old, undocumented RSS feeds: we changed the feed URL, but if you've already added the old URL to your feed reader, we've got a redirect setup there so things should work seamlessly.

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in reply to @jkap's post:

waitwotno
@waitwotno

It could definitely be something to consider, but is this the equivalent of the "super secret url, do not share"? Something to consider is that not all rss readers (what fun) support HTTP authentication, namely Feedly

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zoey-
@zoey-

I would do it by embedding a token in the URL Something like https://cohost.org/private-feed/8f203f9b-6fdc-4f6c-b2e0-bc486b3a1eca/posts.atom. Generate one token per account, display these as premade links in the settings UI, and have a token reset button in case you leak it or something. Similar to Google Calendar's Secret address in iCal Format.

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fluffy
@fluffy

I've written a bunch about feed authentication, and it's a tough nut to crack. My favored protocol is https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth_Ticket_Auth but no readers currently support it as far as I know, and only a handful of sites support it on the publishing end (including mine).

Unfortunately, embedding the token in the URL is a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons; the big one is that Atom readers which share items from a feed will leak the private feed URL.

Here's some articles I've written about the problems (in the context of Publ, my own site publishing system) and some workable approaches:

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jkap
@jkap

looks like yes, it just displays the adult content, which may not be Correct Behavior. we'll figure out what we're doing there.

the RSS feed renders posts slightly differently from the main site so it's missing some of the decision tree around adult content.

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waitwotno
@waitwotno

I haven't had the chance to look into this, but what about content warnings as well? I am on the belief that the RSS feed should display everything, and leave it up to the user to filter out certain keywords themselves. But if you are so inclined - maybe seperate rss feeds that have options to strip out posts with NSFW / CWs and replace them with placeholders?

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jkap
@jkap

like your dashboard? not currently, but we'll consider it for the future. it's tricky for the same auth reasons i went into above when talking about notification feeds.

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

heyyy I was kinda wondering if this was on the roadmap, of course the way this site works maybe I read that it was forever ago and half-forgot it haha

edit: I very much do appreciate the JSON feed as well

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okiyama
@okiyama

One Reddit feature I liked quite a bit was that you could add .json to any URL and get a JSON-ified version of all the info used to build the page. Effectively turns every page into an API endpoint and makes it so people don't have to do more manual scraping.

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okiyama
@okiyama

<3 I'll also mention that if y'all ever get to a point where you start taking community contributions directly I'll happily jump on the bandwagon. I bet you've got a bunch of people saying the same, so get it if opening pandora's box to the malestrom of community development is not the move right now, but I'll keep my eye on the space and feel free to reach out if you wanna chat more about what I may be able to offer the team. TL;DR is 6 years experience "senior" (whatever that means nowadays) software engineer, currently with an SF startup and interested in more direct community involvement on my off-time.

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contextual
@contextual

Ooh good change thank you. As for the shares feedback, I'd personally like to see "three people shared this post" and keep it as recent in the timeline as the most recent share, rather than the same post unedited three times on the same page.

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jkap
@jkap

i mean feedback around RSS feeds specifically, but noted (this is a popular request, there's a lot of unsolved UX issues here since twitter's implementation is (imo) completely dogshit and i haven't seen other platforms try something different (we're obvs aping the tumblr style here))

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ChanceNCounter
@ChanceNCounter

The objectively correct solution would be a dropdown graph or tree of shares, represented as pfps, and if you click a pfp it goes to the post.

We’d need a name for the row or column of one user that would follow a self-thread. Bonus: the occasional 💈

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contextual
@contextual

Oh, hah. I'm genuinely not great at RSS (low power user, I just think they're neat, etc) so I don't consider myself up to speed enough to suggest re: RSS improvements. But you made it better and that's good. (also I really like the feel here of much like tumblr but with a touch of twitter flavor without the dogshit) anyway you're doing awesome <3

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jkap
@jkap

i’ll have to take a look. i manually verified we’re setting everything correctly, so my hunch is that they’re straight up ignoring the field (which is stupid, it’s not like we’re the only site that uses it)

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jkap
@jkap

we do at least have the <source /> field set correctly for atom feeds (although i have not seen a single reader that uses that for anything) and we set the author for shared posts correctly as well (although, again, readers are inconsistent abt how they display that)

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tef
@tef

Couple of questions:

What happens to locked pages?

I assume they have empty feeds, because it would seem bad if your rss feed disappeared and reappeared if you locked your page

Can people opt-out?

As much as the twelve remaining RSS users will complain, one of the things I like about cohost is I can control who is following my page. Offering RSS is offering one gigantic bypass to these controls.

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jkap
@jkap

locked pages 401, we may allow opt-out at some point but it’s not an option rn

internally, we treat the RSS feed as a logged-out user. if you have the profile setting to hide posts from logged-out users enabled (hit the gear icon on your profile), it's essentially disabling the RSS feed as well.

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waitwotno
@waitwotno

Looks great! regarding displaying shares: (Using Feedly)

  • The ability to distinguish between an OP and a share is in the feed name vs the feed item / entry's author works for me (https://i.imgur.com/lGkOXMq.png)

  • Providing context to shares with additional comment would be great, maybe including the previous post and mentioning that there are more in the thread would be a great way to help the reader determine if the post is worth opening up and exploring the thread in detail or not.

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PaulCzege
@PaulCzege

I tried putting it into MastoFeed to see what my Cohost posts would look like posted to Mastodon and it couldn't do it, with this message :

"The server can not fetch the content from this URL. This feed appears to be behind Cloudflare servers. Sometimes that blocks our crawlers from accesing the info."

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eater
@eater

the feeds are very cool. this may be nitpicking, but you seem to be advertising jsonfeed 1.1 and using the author field, and not populating the authors field, which should be used in 1.1 instead of the author field :')

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