Additional Feeds for Micro.blog timeline

I was exploring this RSS help page on the feeds available on Micro.blog, and in addition to the ones offered (https://micro.blog/feeds/username.json), I think it would help to have a few more options

  1. Friends’ posts for what the specified user sees in their timeline WITHOUT replies
  2. Friends’ posts for what the specified user sees in their timeline ONLY replies for mutuals
  3. Friends’ posts for what the specified user sees in their timeline ONLY replies to everyone

cc: @Denny

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Tagging @sod since he might be able to suggest if this is do-able without official help from Micro.blog just like he did for his experimental feeds (love them).

Well, in the digital realm, few things are impossible. :blush: Number one should be easy enough in any feed reader that has support for filtering feed items. In Feedbin, for example, you could set up an action that marks items containing @ (most likely a reply) as read automatically.

Two is trickier, as who you follow is not public information (one has to be signed in to Micro.blog fetch that list). If a third-party developer were to implement this, she would have to make authenticated requests to Micro.blog. Not rocket science by any stretch, but more involved than my relatively simple rewriting proxy, operating only on public feeds.

If I understand number three correctly, it’s the inverse of number one. In that case, that should also be achievable in feed readers with support for filters/actions.

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It would be awesome if Micro.blog could make the first one possible. It’s kind of the ‘first thing in the morning’ type of feed. The next two are simply the conversation views and kinda next in line to check. Unfortunately, I don’t use Feedbin, but am using NNW for Micro.blog now. I’ve to check if it has something like that.

I don’t think NetNewsWire has that, unfortunately. :cry: If you don’t want to switch feed reader, you could transform the feed instead with a tool like siftrss. This is probably what you want for implementing number one:

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Holy shit! I think that worked. Thanks a lot for the link. I just hope no one tags anyone in the body of their post or at least in the first 300 chars :smiling_face:

Yep, that’s an edge case where you would miss a post that’s not a reply. The same thing goes if someone shares an email address, ASCII art, code snippet, etc. containing @. It should be pretty rare, though.

siftrss supports regular expressions, so if that’s your jam, you could identify replies by looking at the link URL. Replies have URLs looking like this: https://micro.blog/jdoe/12345678. But I would say the extra hassle isn’t really worth it. :blush:

Using your link, I was able to get the two feeds working:


Minor quibble are not seeing their profile pictures.

Also, possible to add your two links in the experimental feed in the sans Replies feed? Coz clicking on the links takes me to their blog and not the timeline to respond.

I was revisiting this thread since I stopped using the feeds from the siftrss service. Your experimental feed has spoiled me so I expect the ability to go to the post/conversation Micro.blog from the feed reader.

Wonder why Micro.blog doesn’t natively offer a post-only feed or a mentions-only feed.

This is just me guessing, but could it be that @manton has plenty of features he could potentially work on, along with all the other stuff that comes with running a business, and this is just one of them that (currently) isn’t that high on the to-do list? :blush:

Hmmm…ok. I meant from a technical POV.

I can’t imagine there’s a technical issue preventing an implementation. But someone (Manton) has to write the code. Maybe he isn’t even aware that this is a feature request? Or he has forgotten about it. Or perhaps the demand is low. Or possibly he thinks it’s a good idea, but there are other features that are more important, are requested by more customers, will bring in more money, etc.

You should start lobbying for the request and get more people on board. :blush:

Yep, no technical reason, although the way the timeline works it’s not trivial either. Changing the account setting for the timeline currently causes your timeline to be essentially rebuilt… Different feeds would need different caching.

I would also add that we have a lot of feeds, and the more feeds there are, potentially the more confusing things can be for people. And finally, I’m not totally sure what the URLs should be. :slightly_smiling_face:

I disagree. Essentially according to this page, there are basically five feeds:

  • Timeline
  • Author Posts
  • Author’s Categories
  • Discover
  • Photos

Any additional feeds are just subsets of these. Considering that mentions are an integral part of social networks’ community, its absence is glaring.

Again, I can’t speak for the technical aspects but more feeds for people coz it will get confusing is not accurate.

I dunno, it seems already pretty cluttered to me. I guess we can disagree on this.

Keep in mind that this is not really how we expected most people to read the Micro.blog timeline. Using apps is usually going to be the best experience. The API of course has a lot more functionality.

But to be clear, I think we will add more feeds, I was just trying to explain why we haven’t done it yet.

Fine to disagree and it’s perfectly ok to also prioritize a reading experience. I’m not demanding a feed for the mentions so was just wondering why. Your reason is good enough. However, currently, the API is only used by the official mobile app (even Gluon shut down). Loura’s web app has been a fresh breath of air with its different take on the reading experience.

BTW any reason you do not have a link for the timeline setting (posts only, mutual mentions + posts, etc.) on the front page? There’s too much friction in going to the settings page each time we want to change it. Loura solves it in a different way by having different tabs.

You’re right. I should start a thread on the Help forum for this purpose where people can indicate what features they want most :wink:

Yeah! A lovely thread and a great place to rally support for this feature request.

I’ve been playing around on Feedbin with your suggestion for displaying my timeline seeing only the posts of those who I follow, without replies, but I cannot get it to work.

Do you use Feedbin, and if so, can you help with what the filter would look like. Various formats that I have used have not worked so far.

I’m pretty sure searching for @ in Feedbin has worked in the past, but it looks like it’s not anymore. I just tested. Maybe it has changed with the new search that rolled out this year.

So you will have to come up with another search query that returns only replies, so you can mark them as read with an action. I thought searching for url:micro.blog would work, but that turns up 0 results for me. I can’t tell whether that’s a Feedbin bug or not. It might be worth asking their support about that.

Other than getting that query to work, I’m afraid I’m out of ideas. At least for now. :blush: