All the new RSS emanating out of MastodonLand is blowing my mind. We're all part of the same freaking religion. This has been an incredible day, and I expect tomorrow to be even more so. I have a list of things I want them to look at. For example I think Mastodon's outgoing feeds should support rssCloud so we can get instant updates. I would be happy to show them how it works and help them do the adaptation. Basically all they have to do is add some info to their feed, and ping a special server when they update the feed. We take care of the rest. #
BTW, since RSS is rebounding (yay!) -- I have a Node.js package that makes reading an RSS feed a one line call. It factors out all the variability, and returns a consistent JavaScript object. Reading an RSS feed is as easy as reading a JSON file. I promise. No bullshit. And btw, it also reads Atom and RDF through the same interface. You don't even have to know what format the file is, all that is taken care of. The point is, reading an RSS file was too hard. So I spent the time to make it simple and easy. #<item>s in Mastodon feeds do not have <title>s. It's time for all feed readers to not treat this as an error. Here's a screen shot that illustrates. Also repeating the text where the title goes is not useful or correct, and if your reader does that, it should be fixed. RSS is going places now, and if you don't go with it, people are going to notice. #
Here’s the thing about hardcore programming. You only have so many useful hours for programming every day. After about five or six, you start making mistakes and spend hours trying to get your new code to work, when a fresh start is what’s needed. #
- Do they play around with follower counts? #
- At twitter they most certainly do. #
- There are people with millions of followers who were given those for being friends of the founders. I don't know if they still do it, but in the early days it was very observable. All of a sudden one day a person who had 200 followers had 10000 and then a million the next day. And many of them were nobodies, and a lot of them were journalists who wrote puff pieces about them.#
- We even saw a case where a journo was punished for writing a piece based on leaks from their board of directors. #
- This was not a secret. #