I've been seeing some complaints about paywalled content being posted in the rss.ponder.cat communities.

Here's my proposal:

• Split the bot into two users: free@rss.ponder.cat and paywall@rss.ponder.cat.
• Make a rule similar to some other communities, forbidding people from posting full text or links to archive.is on the paywalled communities.
• If you like some of the paywalled content, subscribe to it. You can afford $5-10/month for one or two sources, and it'll help them a lot. Creating good content on the internet isn't free.
• If you don't want the paywalled content, block the paywall bot and you won't have to see it in your feed.
• If you don't want any of it, block both bots or the whole instance.

It's a real problem that Lemmy communities sometimes have paywalled content from 50 different sources, which makes it annoying to use and unreasonable to tell people to subscribe to content they want to read, because they would need 50 different subscriptions.

I think the RSS bot is a better solution than just ripping off content from all the high-quality online news sources and shrugging your shoulders if they go out of business and can't do it anymore a year from now. Everybody wins. High quality online news can still pay their bills, and you get a good way to stay up to date on it within Lemmy.

I'm posting this here instead of in the meta community because I have a feeling that most of the people who are saying they don't like the paywalled content are not subscribed, and I'd like to get feedback from the community as a whole.

What do people think?

Edit: I've implemented the proposal. There are now separate bots @free@rss.ponder.cat and @paywall@rss.ponder.cat.

Hackaday.com serves up Fresh Hacks Every Day from around the Internet. Their playful posts are the gold-standard in entertainment for engineers and engineering enthusiasts.

/c/hackaday@rss.ponder.cat hosts every post from Hackaday for your Lemmy reading pleasure.

!hackaday@rss.ponder.cat

I started up my own instance and now I have realized that there's no reason anyone would join mine instead of any other instance.

That's no good. What neat stuff would the Fediverse like to see in a Lemmy instance?

• Follow RSS feeds in your Lemmy feed? I have that already, in a way, but it would be nice to be able to do it for any feed automatically without it being clunky.
• Follow Mastodon users? Or tags?
• Embedded video? That seems costly.
• Hackability? The ability to run your own customized front end? Or good scripting features in the browser console?
• A better looking UI? This one is functional but it's not pretty.
• Better moderation? I have heard the Lemmy tools aren't that good.
• Something else?

Yesterday I posted about rss.ponder.cat, with communities automatically fed from a selection of RSS feeds. Today I made !meta@rss.ponder.cat, with:

• A sticky-post roadmap of the RSS feeds that are already available
• A place for people to request communities to be added
• A place for me to post announcements about new communities

I don't plan to spam !newcommunities@lemmy.world with every new RSS feed, but I figured I would let people know the location of the community that will get announcements about new RSS feed communities, in case they want to subscribe to it.

Cheers!

rss.ponder.cat is live! You can have Lemmy communities fed by RSS news feeds:

• !bbc@rss.ponder.cat

• !nytimes@rss.ponder.cat

• !nymag_intelligencer@rss.ponder.cat

• !nplusonemag@rss.ponder.cat

• !scientificamerican@rss.ponder.cat

• !technologyreview@rss.ponder.cat

• !newyorker@rss.ponder.cat

• !hackaday@rss.ponder.cat

• !pluralistic@rss.ponder.cat

A lot of big sites offer feeds for different categories of article, but I'm not sure it is smart to mirror every single one into a Lemmy community. The ones above, for periodicals like the BBC, are only the front page stories, which seems necessary for it not to turn into spam.

The Ars mirror, on the other hand, I broke down by category, at least partly. You can get all the articles:

• !arstechnica_index@rss.ponder.cat - Every single article
• !arstechnica_features@rss.ponder.cat - Only feature articles

Or, you can subscribe to individual categories of articles:

• !arstechnica_science@rss.ponder.cat
• !arstechnica_gaming@rss.ponder.cat
• !arstechnica_tech@rss.ponder.cat
• !arstechnica_gear@rss.ponder.cat
• !arstechnica_apple@rss.ponder.cat

I'll see how it goes. I don't want it to become a source of spam.

If you want to have an RSS feed as a community, ask. They're easy to add. Just say something and I'll set it up.

Happy RSSing!

Ever wanted to have an RSS feed in Lemmy? Well now you can!

rss.ponder.cat is set up to mirror any RSS feed into a community. You can subscribe to the feed like any other community and you'll get every new story as a Lemmy post.

Check it out:

!nytimes@rss.ponder.cat

!bbc@rss.ponder.cat

!arstechnica_science@rss.ponder.cat

Leave a comment with any RSS feed and I'll create a community for it, and then you can have RSS in your Lemmy.

Check it out!