rss-butt-plug

🍑 e x p e r i m e n t a l 🍑

A SSB client which "plugs" a RSS feed into the Scuttleverse.

Created in the same spirit as Lykin, for educational purposes and to help others dip a toe into the SSB development ecosystem. It's mostly a demo and I don't necessarily intend to maintain it.

Please read the Be Gentle section before using it on the mainnet.

Scuttlin' 🤓

Create a rss-butt-plug.yaml:

---
# where all data will be stored, is a relative path to the current working directory
data-dir: .rss-butt-plug

# the RSS feed URL
feed: https://openrss.org/opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/updates

# the RSS feed profile avatar URL (will be converted to blob)
avatar: https://images.opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/676f245/logo/256.png

# RSS feed poll frequency (minutes)
poll: 5

# the internal go-sbot configuration options
addr: localhost
port: 8008
ws-port: 8989
shs-cap: "1KHLiKZvAvjbY1ziZEHMXawbCEIM6qwjCDm3VYRan/s="
hops: 1

Run it:

go run rss-butt-plug.go

Wire up a local Patchwork client (or something that supports legacy replication, see FAQ for more) for reading & sharing with the broader SSB ecosystem.

rss-butt-plug generates an invite every time it runs which you can use to invite clients with. Feeds will be polled every 5 minutes by default, you can configure this.

Limitations 🛑

• Multiple RSS feeds are not supported. It would be great to have but I don't know how to do it (afaiu, go-sbot is one identity per-instance). You could run multiple instances of rss-butt-plug, an instance per RSS feed. You'd need to tweak the ports in the rss-butt-plug.yaml to not have conflicts but it could work.

• The HTML -> Markdown might be a bit dodgy, so I would recommend doing some testing on local throwaway Patchwork / rss-butt-plug identities before doing any mainnet replication. You can test parse a feed by passing it as an argument, e.g. ./rss-butt-plug https://laipower.xyz/rss and the first post will be shown.

• All go-ssb experimental caveats apply, see the FAQ for more.

Be gentle 🧐

You may feel the sudden urge to plug loads of RSS feeds into the Scuttleverse. I certainly did. However, with some testing, I quickly realised this isn't a very good idea.

One example, a lot of great SSB people are also on the Fediverse but the RSS feeds provided by Mastodon trim the titles and don't carry over the images in the posts properly (have tested in a couple of feed readers).

Also, you can't @ a plug identity on SSB because there are no humans behind it. So, if you plug an RSS feed connected with other aspects of your online life then how do people speak to you?

I think it's a question of going slow and waiting for people to test out the tool and see what dynamic it produces. Please test your feeds first, see how it looks, see what content the feed provides and ofc, see if it "fits" being plugged into SSB.

Some prior art (discovered after publishing the tool):

• %0B1nY9hSwKV9rieJGug2mB3qFuaWksXt5/Zh7n63odk=.sha256

Internal features 💻

Some internal things that might be nice to know / refer to if also hacking on this or building your own stuff. I would guess that a lot of the following ingredients could be generalised into other kinds of clients, scripts and tools.

rss-butt-plug does the following...

• Internally manages a go-sbot instance, handy for emdedding magic scuttlin' superpowers in your Go scripts.

• Creates a TCP client which makes requests to the managed go-sbot via the MUXRPC interface. E.g. generates an invite.

• In general, uses some "direct" Go API bindings which work on the local log. These APIs are more low-level and involved than the MUXRPC interface but are more powerful.

• Image uploads. The HTML is parsed to look for images while converting it to Markdown. When an image is found, it is uploaded as a blob and then the blob ref replaces the traditional link. Clients like Patchwork then know how to show the images in the renderer.

• Breaking up large posts into root + reply threads so that we do not go over the length limit of a post. The implementation of this is quite a hack, so go easy on me.

• Uses a goreleaser config to create cross-platform binaries.

Inspo 🌻

• %fzitwDLKcKgGL3RKv6BrBHzQRr1qC7QCeC6PpirMwwE=.sha256
• %JmVycMs1KqxH0LYzXDnbhNCKH9sCOtBZE/yDU+cBWoY=.sha256

ACK 👍

• go-ssb
• egonelbre/gophers

LICENSE