Blueskyfeedbot: Post RSS Feeds to Bluesky via GitHub Actions

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/feed-to-bluesky

by hrpnk • 1 year ago

154 70 1 year ago

rpmisms3• 1 year ago

OK but not writing your own Cron expressions is just sad.

Not everyone knows how to use Cron, the comment is a good tip for those that don't. The target audience for a solution like this might be less technical than the average Github user.

anonymousiam• 1 year ago

I'll assume that your comment was not intended to reflect on the average Bluesky user, but there might also be something there too.

simonw2• 1 year ago

I've been using Cron for over 20 years. I still use https://crontab.guru rather than trying to remember the syntax for those fields.

rpmisms3• 1 year ago

Cron expressions aren't bad. Now regex.... nope.

Eric_WVGG4• 1 year ago

RSS and AT Proto have been on my mind all week.

Even though RSS is my main source of news, it’s impossible to get around the fact that the (incredibly, unfathomably stupid) shutdown of Google Reader kneecapped it.

AT Protocol is more than “let’s make Twitter more open” — it’s an open protocol for anything that’s real-time and shareable. I was never a big Google Reader guy, I liked traditional clients like NetNewsWire, but the sociability of Google Reader cannot be dismissed.

I’m not sure that just bridging RSS to Bluesky is the future… a distinct AT Proto lexicon seems like the actual way forward IMHO

Exciting times!

simonw2• 1 year ago

Google Reader shut down nearly 12 years ago. Its legacy now is that there are still people who are pissed off about that, and I get the impression that a surprising amount of them are now in positions where they get to make purchasing decisions over whether or not to buy Google Cloud.

(Being a Mac+iPhone person I've settled in quite happily with NetNewsWire now, but it took me a few years to get there.)

blakesterz• 1 year ago

My distrust of Google certainly started with the shutdown of Reader. Everything they've done since has made it worse. I was in the position to choose a cloud provider several years ago and would not even consider GCP. I seriously doubt they'll kill GCP, but I see no reason to take a chance on anything Google does outside of search, docs, mail and the core things.

oigursh• 1 year ago

They tried to force the free GSuite editions into paid a year or two ago.

toomuchtodo3• 1 year ago

Bluesky has launched RSS feeds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 - Jan 2024

https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds

How would you extend this ("a distinct AT Proto lexicon seems like the actual way forward IMHO") beyond the RSS feed you can get from a Bluesky profile?

theshrike79• 1 year ago

RSS feed is a pull type thing, AT Proto is push if I understand it correctly.

So instead of you polling an RSS feed on Bluesky, they would send you a stream of messages

skybrian3• 1 year ago

I don’t know what you mean by “kneecapped.” I’ve using Newsblur for at least a decade and it works fine.

Eric_WVGG4• 1 year ago

I mean that it kneecapped the idea of RSS in the social consciousness. Most people believe that when Google Reader shut down RSS stopped existing, if they even knew what RSS was in the first place.

A friend of mine — in tech — asked me the other day where I was hearing a bunch of stuff and I said “my RSS feeds” and he laughed at me. That”s what I mean.

TheCowboy2• 1 year ago

It's complicated, and I think it's less malicious in a way that "kneecapped" implies. Sure, RSS still exists in some form, but I think the utility of it has been in decline, and a lot of 'content' simply isn't accessible by RSS feed anymore.

An argument can be made that they provided an RSS reader service no one could come close to matching and basically dominated the area. Google's deep support also helped it proliferate. It is maybe underrated that RSS was likely one defense the web had against the dominance of walled gardens and social media. It allowed a lot of sites to flourish that I think would not get any traction today.

throwaway519• 1 year ago

I ride a horse to work. But I will admit the lack of watering holes and places to tie her up outside the supermarket has become a pain.

mhitza4• 1 year ago

an open protocol for anything that’s real-time and shareable

Does that mean that at the protocol level one can share content of larger sizes than what Bluesky does by default?

Even though not standard at least via the ActivityPub protocol one can set more reasonable character lengths, though unsure how most Mastodon clients handle that in practice.

Bluesky devs seem set, from some past HN interaction, on keeping the restriction in place for the app.

In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits. As to what HN would be in such a future: a stream (or whatever term their use) of content curated/moderated by dang.

pferde• 1 year ago

There already is a Reddit-like application that uses ActivityPub. It's called Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org/).

emaro2• 1 year ago

In my experience, Mastodon clients handle large posts (say 5000 chars instead of 500) very well.

In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits.

Not sure if you're saying that Bluesky is decentralized and Mastodon not, which if anything would be the other way around. The other interpretation is that you can see Bluesky as a replacement for HN/Reddit, but not Mastodon. My take is that both are unfit for that, since they're heavily embracing the micro-blogging format. I'm not sure if there are any ATProto applications like this already, but Lemmy and MBin are both examples of decentralized link aggregators using ActivityPub.

ghfhghg2• 1 year ago

How did Google Reader dying kneecap RSS? I still use it to this day

oneeyedpigeon2• 1 year ago

I can't remember the exact history, but Google's dropping of Reader may have encouraged browser manufacturers to drop their support of RSS.

bri58ADD• 1 year ago

Is it weird that I feel weird about using github as basically a free lambda service?

threeseed• 1 year ago

Well Microsoft is using Github to put developers out of a job.

So I wouldn't feel all that much sympathy for them.

toolz• 1 year ago

I think it's far more fair to say that developers have agreed to let them use their data (that they will use to reduce dev jobs) in exchange for a service that can almost entirely be easily migrated elsewhere.

If you think MS using github code to train AI is bad, let's be pragmatic about where we're putting the blame or there's no shot we can course correct.

I personally am not looking forward to the pain of losing my job, but I would never presume my job is more important than progress. My job wouldn't even exist if we halted progress to save the jobs.

sacckey• 1 year ago

Nice! Bluesky’s App Passwords make it easy to try third-party integrations like this, which is great.

nemofoo• 1 year ago

Nice work! I’ve been thinking a lot about rss lately

omoikane• 1 year ago

The author also made a post here:

https://hachyderm.io/@joschi/113914355705581670

Second post in that thread has some demo output.

edoceo• 1 year ago

I'll make a plug for n8n which is a tool to rig stuff to other stuff. I bet it could do this.

https://n8n.io/

Can self host too

Boltgolt• 1 year ago

AI-native

It's IFTTT with an LLM integrated?

victorbjorklund• 1 year ago

maybe more an open source zapier and its history goes back way before LLM:s. It is a good no code product for selfhosting (just a user, no connection to the company)

stevekrouse• 1 year ago

There's a val (hosted function) that does this too!

https://www.val.town/v/jordan/bsky_rss_poll

MattSayar• 1 year ago

Oh this is way better than me manually running my "post to sites" script https://github.com/MattSayar/post_to_socials

methou• 1 year ago

I might have misunderstood. If this a part of static site generation it might make some sense. But just syncing some random rss feed to bsky with GH actions seems like a bit excessive and wasteful. A simple daemon can do.

mullingitover• 1 year ago

We've really come full circle. Back when Facebook was a user-friendly place, you could connect any RSS feed to your Facebook feed. My FB was just a collection of things I posted to del.icio.us, flickr, etc etc. It really was a sign of the crapification of that place that was to come when they ripped out this feature.

user3939382• 1 year ago

Not to mention XMPP integration. Obviously a totally different philosophy that actually cared about the user.

edhelas• 1 year ago

XMPP fully support news feed publication using XMPP Pubsub https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub

Here's the result https://mov.im/community/news.movim.eu/ArsTechnica

The awesome thing is that articles stored in XMPP are actually Atom articles, so there's very little to do.

corobo• 1 year ago

Used to be able to add friends birthdays and events you'd rsvp'd "Going" to your calendar via iCal URLs too. That was so damn useful.

politelemon• 1 year ago

Is the cache so that items in the RSS feed don't get re-posted? Feels like it could go wrong, especially if the RSS feed is a slow one.

ulrischa• 1 year ago

Somehow spooky for what github actions are used. On the one side it is cool to have hosted task runners with multiple options thanks to using vms in github actions, on the other side is the question: is this what github actions ate ment for?

wiether2• 1 year ago

According to the official documentation[1]:

You can discover, create, and share actions to perform any job you'd like, including CI/CD, and combine actions in a completely customized workflow.

I guess it wasn't the goal initially, but it includes so much features now that it became a kind of _serverless_ orchestrator.

I don't use GitHub for that but my own self-hosted Gitea instance (so not quite serverless here), and I use it for this exact purpose: orchestrating containerized jobs without needing to setup something trickier. And since it's directly attached to a git repository, you don't need a second tool. So you know have everything configured and versionned at the same place.

Sure, it won't work if you need to run multiple big runners to do a job, but for small, periodic tasks like that, it's just so easy to do.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/actions

rcarmo• 1 year ago

Is there a Python library to do this someplace already, or a good REST walkthrough?

hn1986• 1 year ago

is something like this possible with Threads app?

Blueskyfeedbot: Post RSS Feeds to Bluesky via GitHub Actions

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