Mastodawn

lonk Jun 28, 2023

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

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Leigh Dodds Jun 28, 2023

@lonk it's be great if there was an RSS feed.

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lonk Jun 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)

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lonk Jun 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?

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Leigh Dodds

@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.