One thing that will make @Mastodon adoption massive would be the ability to publish from static contents. This is, like being able to follow an rss file or in json stored somewhere.

Obviously all the fingerprint userdata and likes/rt wont be handled by the “instance”. But this can be solved by making a fediverse software that works as an intermediate, allowing to register users picking this info from an rss file, registering the user and doing the rest of the standard fediverse logic.

Something like this will reduce the need to setup new instances, reduce overall network traffic and let people publish anonymously from static sites like github pages or newspapers.

The main issue here is standarizing the whole thing but technically it’s should be easy.

Comments on this?

@pancake Fediverse SW (plz don't just promote Mastodon) have nice open API's so we can go nuts with our ideas without going through standardization rituals.

A quick search got me this little tool: https://codeberg.org/MarvinsMastodonTools/feed2fedi , and IIRC there was some service that did the same without coding/hosting yourself.

On the other hand I use Fedi as an RSS _generator_, so I kind of agree that having some features built-in makes a difference - question is how we determine if the API is not enough?

@buherator@infosec.place @pancake@infosec.exchange if your usecase breaks the federation and/or you can't do what you want, probably the API is not enough

in saying this, standards are what people agree on, and if the standard doesn't do what you want just write code that makes it work anyway tbh

@buherator there are tools like this but you still need to run this tool to pull the rss and publish in a fedi instance. My proposal is that all this can be made by the fediverse server itself. I don’t want to host credentials or run software in my machine or random server’s cron to do that

@buherator ideally static publishers shouldnt depend on having accounts associated, bridges can be made like the bird makeup and assuming the rss file will be located in the same place like “@pancake@radare.org” can be translated to https://radare.org/pancake/feed.rss and cached by the instance. User data like avatar and such can be also exposed in the same rss file and your instance can easily detect if the remote server is a static fediverse endpoint or not. Those posts can’t be liked or have notifications for the publisher but replies and boosts may work well if standarized

@pancake You mean you'd like to e.g. show RSS content under your own account?

This definitely sounds like a feature request, still I think a 3rd-party service with scoped credentials (at least Akkoma supports this, my bots have post-only creds for example) can still hit a sweet spot.

@pancake Isn't this achievable by a blog-like ActivityPub service (or an actual ActivityPub-enabled blog engine, like WriteFreely)?

@buherator yes. But this requires a service, i want it to be static and accountless

@pancake @buherator Hubzilla , Zap and maybe Friendica can create channels (social profiles) that source their contents directly from RSS feeds, in the form of hubzilla retoots. You can follow those via ActivityPub if it's enabled in that server. https://hubzilla.org/help/en/about/about#Service_Federation

@logout thats still requiring to setup accounts or services, i checked those sites and it wasnt clear to me how that works without setting up an account

@buherator thing is that such service doesnt exist, could be done but will still require someone to run the instance somewhere. Any actual #akkoma or #mastodon dev could share their thoughs in this thread on this?

@buherator seems like someone already did it ^^ https://github.com/jehna/mastofeeder you can follow accounts like @xkcd.com

@stevelord @buherator i post from curl in cron, it’s very convenient. But the benefit i see in posting via rss is that you have control on your data and u dont need an account or a server. Just a static file in gh pages or anywhere else is enough