Suggestion: if you consider converting your threadiverse feeds to Mastodon hashtag feeds, don’t.

#rss #rssfeeds

A continuation of the Mbin situation, after that post, I noticed even after fixing the links, posts wouldn’t appear.

Turns out my main instance is in private mode because of scrappers, and my backup plan uses Cloudflare which apparently doesn’t like me connecting to Newsboat.

While I could use another alt I have, now also for RSS and then just set the redirect script for its posts too, I was in a hurry so I just made a copy of each link and converted them to Mastodon links, since threadiverse communities auto-attach their handles as hashtags.

But by doing that, 4 problems arise.

First, a hashtag may be used for different contexts, like !news@indie-ver.se and !news@lemmy.world covering pretty different topics, but their resulting hashtag feed, e.g. https://mastodon.social/tags/news.rss, encompassing their posts plus whatever else from wherever else.

Second, mass conversion can cause duplicated feeds, and handling of that in feed readers is rare from my experience.

Third, some people abuse the amount of hashtags, a.k.a. spam, specially on the microblog side of things.

Fourth, the consequence of all 3 above, posts are fetched en masse. In my case for example, what stays around 600~1200 posts a day (still a lot, I know; working on that), went to around 5000.

Nope. Not for me. 🙅‍♂

At worse, if someone wants to make an exercise on patience and do it, at least make a backup soon before adding the hashtag feeds.

Hope this helps someone.