I started using SearXNG and actually blocked Reddit from the results. As someone who almost always put “Reddit” in my google searches, I’ve been impressed with the quality of my search results without relying on Reddit.

Every community has their feeds listed in the sidebar. That is actually how the bot is controlled. It looks up communities, scrapes any RSS feeds in the sidebar and then posts any unseen links to the community.

Click the magnifying glass in the top right corner next to your notifications. Make sure you are searching for “All”. There appears to be some sort of bug where if you search for communities that it won’t return anything. If you search “All” it’ll find the community. Make sure to put in the actual name of the community you’re wanting to find in this format: !community@server.url. You wan’t to put in the actual community name, not the friendly name. In this example I’m searching for Youtube News (yt_news) on Lemmy.link.

I would absolutely love to see it! The biggest hurdle so far has been finding quality RSS feeds.

https://github.com/kensand/rss-lemmy-bot

Just to be clear… this is not the source to linkbot. The creator of this rss bot is @kensand@lemmy.kensand.net

Thank you for the suggestions. I’ll get them added to my todo list.

Apologize if I ran afoul of any code-of-conduct. Haven’t used the cross-post before and I wasn’t sure if it would work across instances.

This is fantastic! Thank you!! I’ll work through the list and see what I can do.

Absolutely fair points and I already had the concern about being “fair and balanced”. The feeds I’ve added so far are either diverse (Youtube News is a great example: it contains both CNN and Fox News YouTube feeds) or are generally considered neutral (AP News and Reuters).

When it comes to UFOs and religion I’d have no problem adding them, but would absolutely break those out into their own communities. If someone is super interested in UFOs then they are welcome to subscribe to the UFO community with like minded people. Ultimately I’m trying to keep the number of feeds per community fairly low and make sure they are on-topic.

All that said I think it’s up to the community to upvote/downvote as they wish. That is really the power of link aggregators like Lemmy and Reddit. Crap gets downvoted into oblivion and the spicy nugs float to the top. Link aggregators do come with their own drawbacks (echo chambers and trolls to name two), but they are very powerful once you’ve found the right communities.

Thank you for the well wishes! Sorry it’s not right for you, but I really appreciate the feedback to make sure I’m executing this properly.

I was able to get them all subscribed on my Beehaw account. You’d want to search for !yt_explainers@lemmy.link to find the community.

Since the posts are to my Lemmy.link server, all of the posts and comments will be on my server. The mod work will be on me to maintain.

I have plans to open source linkbot once I clean up the code. It was thrown together in a couple of hours yesterday, so it’s not well formatted. However, someone just commented on another post that they had just finished their bot and posted it to GitHub. I haven’t looked into it at all, but you can find the link to that comment here.

You know what they say about great minds!

I initially went with Reuters, but their feed is a bunch of patting themselves on the back for breaking news. Maybe they have different feeds I can find. Did not think of AP, but I’ll get that one added because I agree that both are better (more neutral, fact based) sources.

That’s definitely not the goal. My vision of this project was to simply combine Lemmy + RSS. You get the benefit of news stream from RSS with the community upvotes/downvotes and comments of Lemmy. I had initially tried to set up TT-RSS and Newsblur, but both of them were difficult to set up and this felt like a better solution. I’m also extremely open to adding communities and feeds as requested… absolutely not trying to curate news for people.

Yep. I was just trying to explain to my spouse how to subscribe to lemmy.link communities from their main instance. It is not intuitive at all. Unfortunately I don’t have an Android device, but if you go to the Communities tab on beehaw.org you should be able to search for the communities on lemmy.link.

Great catch! Can’t believe I didn’t already have that. I’ve added World News with BBC and Al Jazeera. Also added US News community with NBC and CBS US news feeds.

That’s the idea. Linkbot will scrape all of the feeds from the community sidebar and post new links from the RSS feeds.

Yep. As I start to see which RSS sources are junk I’ll remove them and attempt to replace with better quality feeds. If you have any suggestions I’m all ears.

I’ve added a programming community with Stack Overflow’s blog as a feed. I’ll see what else I can come up with.

Good idea. I’ve added a US Politics with The Hill. I’ll find some more feeds later.