You can follow external forums with RSS feeds through the fediverse

#forums #rss #rssfeeds

I don’t remember if I made a post specifically about that, so if I did, may this at least work as a reminder. =)

In a time where centralization as a means of seamlessness still seems to be a prevalent market strategy, dedicated forums may still be eclipsed by market behemoths.

However, by this same strategy, there are some tools in the fediverse that allow having non-ActivityPub forums in one’s feed, making accessing them far more seamless and by extension giving them more relevance (plus makes sharing stuff easier). Just, as previously said, the forum needs to have a feed of its own.

Piefed recently added pulling RSS feeds’ updates as posts to communities, crust.piefed.social being a case I’m aware that already supports it. RSS Parrot (@birb@rss-parrot.net), Studio Freesia (not finding the @ rn) and Friendica (according to its docs) allow pulling as microblog (e.g. Mastodon) posts. And there are a few self-hosted bots I’ve come across for Mastodon and Lemmy too. And considering Misskey gives the users access to the API through (iirc) a per-account key, something could be cooked relatively simple, I’d imagine.

Sure, there may be some exceptions. Tumblr blocks connection to RSS Parrot from what I got answered in the issues section of the Codeberg repo, one feed never got pulled on crust.piefed.social for me which makes me think it’s an anti-bot system getting panicked, and Nitter is unresponsive if it’s overloaded and thus RSS Parrot can’t ping it for the initial setup. But these from my experience are exceptions.

Also cases like GOG and, to a lesser degree, Steam, though not having feeds for their forums, what they do have may at least make it easier to access the forums. In GOG’s case for example, the news posts’ comments are tied to the general forum, so you’d be 3 clicks away from accessing it. On Steam’s case, the Community Announcements and News Hub feeds for a given appid, mirrors of one another btw, though more rarely used, in a similar fashion have their comments tied to the respective forums, serving also as a reminder. Other cases with news RSS but no forum feed, or a poorly implemented one, may also benefit from that.

Hope this helps. =)