Allow users to add rss/atom feeds to their streams
Nick
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Adding support for adding rss/atom feeds would help make diaspora more useful and less lonely, and would be particularly helpful for encouraging use of diaspora while the network effect (not many of people's friends are currently on diaspora) continues to work against it.
My suggested behaviour for this would be that users could add feeds in an aspect of their choice (but that they would go in a 'web feed' aspect by default). Users could add feeds either by pasting the address into the diaspora search bar, or through adding the feed directly from the browser (I'm not sure the technicalities of that but it should certainly be possible from e.g. firefox).
I would propose that this be made part of the standard diaspora behaviour, rather than as an app.
goob Sat 15 Jun 2013 10:04PM
Here's a discussion about RSS feeds: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1797 - basically, it needs to wait for an API to be created and made stable, which is one of the biggest development tasks facing Diaspora. Here's a discussion about the API: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/3467
Nick Sat 15 Jun 2013 10:14PM
Yep, just saw that - I would think that rss feeds should be implemented as standard though, rather than requiring an app to use.
I'm not even sure I'd call what I'm suggesting an rss reader, i'm talking pretty basic inclusion of feeds here (on a par with other contacts).
Brent Bartlett Sat 15 Jun 2013 10:43PM
Thank you for bringing this up! Awhile back, there was a user who had some "bots", which operated like RSS feeds. You could message him, and ask to be added to one of the bots' feeds; then, new posts from that feed would be added to your stream. I forget what the syntax was; "!subscribe xkcd-bot", or something like that. It was pretty neat, and I remember thinking that this would be a cool feature for Diaspora to support officially.
Extending on this idea, you could allow comments on each feed-item. This way, small communities based around websites could spring up on Diaspora. So, a user could add "BBC News" to their feed. A link to a news story would appear in their stream. They could click on the link, read the story, and then join the conversation about that story on Diaspora.
Nick Mon 23 Dec 2013 12:32PM
crossreferencing to github feature request: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/4641
Nick · Sat 15 Jun 2013 9:59PM
I think this is potentially quite a good way to encourage uptake of diaspora and overcome some of the hurdles of 'most people are currently not using it so it's a bit lonely'!