lonk

I'm experimenting with aggregating links posted on Mastodon and Bluesky. I extract the links from posts on public server timelines and rank them by popularity and recency: https://linklonk.com/social

I don't link back to Mastodon posts or user profiles to prevent abuse/targeted harassment.

I would love to get feedback from the Mastodon community about the design. Are there any ethical concerns that I'm missing? How could it be improved?

More context: https://linklonk.com/item/7277725441818656768

LinkLonk

Jun 28, 2023 at 12:47amWeb
Show threadLeigh DoddsJun 28, 2023
@lonk it's be great if there was an RSS feed.
Show threadlonkJun 28, 2023

@ldodds the current page is sorted by popularity and relevance. RSS is a sequence of entries. Would you want to see all links posted? Or only links that have passed some threshold of popularity?

hnrss.org does something similar for HackerNews: there is a feed of all content submitted to HN (https://hnrss.org/newest) and a feed of submissions that got at least N points (https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100)

Show threadlonkJun 28, 2023

@ldodds I was thinking if it would make sense for LinkLonk to expose a bot account that you could subscribe to and it would send you some number of top links per day to your Mastodon account.

The idea of LInkLonk is to recommend links that were liked by people who liked the same content as you in the past.

Would that be better than RSS?

Show threadLeigh DoddsJun 29, 2023

@lonk some people might like that, but for me, my reading workflow is built around a feed reader and a bookmarking service.

Stuff fed into Mastodon would mean I just have to copy links out.

As I said in my other reply, I'm always curious about what is broadly in the zeitgeist rather than too much recommendations. I find more interesting or surprising stuff that way.

Optimising for the unexpected (but not harmful) is sometimes good.

Show threadLeigh DoddsJun 29, 2023

@lonk I use Hacker News Daily which just has top 10 https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

I think I'm mostly interested in seeing all the popular links, e.g. from /popular, rather than posts above a threshold.

I add this type of service to my aggregator to help me break out of filter bubbles, so I'm interested in what people are reading rather than tuning it too closely.

Hacker News Daily

Show threadlonkJul 1, 2023

@ldodds thanks the HN Daily link.

Top N daily links sounds better that a points threshold.

I also imagined that you wanted a feed that contains each link as a separate entry, but HN Daily bundles them in one update. Is that the format you prefer?

This also gave me an idea that I could add generally popular content as another section to the email newsletter that LinkLonk sends today - to help expand the bubble.

Show threadLeigh DoddsJul 7, 2023
@lonk sorry slow response as I've been away. Yes separate entries for Top N is generally preferable I think. Works with the feed format better.
Show threadMarcos KirschJun 28, 2023
@lonk too bad about not linking back. It’d be a good way to discover interesting people to follow.
Show threadlonkJun 28, 2023

@kirsch I think the concern with this would that it would enable trolls to find targets for harassment as well. For discoverability it would probably make sense to have an explicit opt in. For example, we could create an account for this purpose that if you follow it then LInkLonk would know that you want to be discoverable in that index.

What do you think?