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Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter

posted by on Monday December 18 2017, @08:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the stupid-blue-bird dept.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

So, apparently around November 5th we stopped posting to Twitter. We didn't find out until around the end of that month and when we did nobody had the time and/or ability to look into why until this past week.

Now how we get our headlines over to Twitter is overly complicated and, frankly, idiotic. It's done by one of our IRC bots pulling headlines from the RSS feed and posting them on Twitter as @SoylentNews. The bot was written back in 2014 with hand-rolled (as opposed to installed via package manager) Python libraries and hasn't been updated since. This was breakage that should absolutely have been expected to happen. Twitter's penchant for arbitrarily changing their unversioned API means you either keep on top of changes or expect things to break for no apparent reason.

Here's the question: do we even care? We can either find someone who's willing to rewrite the bot to a new Twitter library, do it the sane way as either a cron or slashd job, or just say to hell with it since we only have two hundred or so followers on Twitter anyway. What say you, folks?

[TMB Note]: Twitter's who-to-follow algorithms really impressed me this morning when I logged in to manually post this story. How did they know we were all huge @JustinBieber and @BarackObama fans?

[Update]: We're again annoying Twitter users by spreading relative intelligence across their platform of choice. Credit goes to Crash for wisely pointing out that we don't have to code everything ourselves.

 
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Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 128 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday December 18 2017, @02:26PM (5 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday December 18 2017, @02:26PM (#611396)

    do a NNTP backend* with a private, domain-restricted, send-only email-server that implements the accounts' posting and modding.

    If the possibility for a lean, mean iOS/Android app doesn't interest you, when the anti-net-neutrality tiers kick-in I'm sure you'll come to appreciate the protocol's efficiency. Especially if soylent ever runs out of funds but will be able to fallback to NNTP-only while running on some toaster and gathering funds.

    Or, you know, just don't do nothing.

    *like the one over here: https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibenews [github.com]

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @02:38PM (2 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @02:38PM (#611402) Homepage Journal

    Funny you should say that... Have a look here [github.com] and here [github.com]. NCommander is a wacky, wacky boss man.

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  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday January 05 2018, @08:51PM (1 child)

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday January 05 2018, @08:51PM (#618507) Homepage Journal

    I took a serious stab at netnews back in 2015 (to the point I ran an article for people to play with the demo), but it's NOT easy to do. The largest problem is NNTP as a protocol is actually fairly clunky under the hood and doesn't map well ... to just about anything due to the way article IDs and references work. The proof of concept code was a unidirectional dump that essentially turned SoylentNews into a UUCP feed, and then dropped it into INN. The intent for bi-drectionality was publish a SoylentNews hierarchy as moderated, and some clever scripting, but it was quickly turning to a path to madness.

    I could be convinced to revive the work but it was a lukewarm reception at the time. The gopher code was a perl-based server since gopher is trivial to implement but I never got very far in it due to lack of motivation.

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    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday January 12 2018, @02:01PM

      by RamiK (1813) on Friday January 12 2018, @02:01PM (#621368)

      The proof of concept code was a unidirectional dump

      Yeah I looked it up and figured out it would be easier to do it all from scratch... Which means nothing will get done :D

      could be convinced to revive the work

      Nah these sort of redundancies are only worthwhile developing in advance if they're easy to do. The most likely scenario is that the providers will gradually start billing more and more and there will be plenty of time later on. If it wasn't in the context of the twitter feed, I wouldn't have even bothered mentioning it.

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