Bringing the Shred to the Fediverse
Last year I bought the domain shrediverse.net hoping to start a
Fediverse instance for musicians and music fans alike. However, there
didn’t seem to be much interest. So after several months and less than
10 people joining, I shut it down. I think this niche is filled by the
wonderful admin at the
German Mastodon instance metalhead.club.
So what do I do with this cool-as-heck domain name? The idea is to make
it an instance for bots that post from the RSS feeds of music
publications, and repost from artists’ Twitter and Instagram accounts.
There are probably many people on the fediverse like myself that aren’t
on Twitter and don’t otherwise participate in “mainstream” social media,
at least not for the purpose of following our favorite bands.
How do I do this? Well, with Nitter
being dead it’s a bit more difficult to get RSS feeds from Twitter
accounts now. I’ve looked around quite a bit, tried self-hosting RSS Bridge and RSS Hub, and the only thing
I’ve found that is still able to get Tweets into an RSS feed without
having a paid developer account is RSS.app. It is a paid service ($10/month for
15 feeds, $20/month for 100 feeds), but works very well and scrapes many
other websites and services as well. This may not be sustainable in the
long run, but it works for now and can be easily replaced if a better
solution comes along.
Once I have converted the Twitter/Instagram account into an XML RSS feed at RSS.app, I then proxy that through Feedburner in order to create an ATOM feed that is compatible with Mastofeed. Now to get this ATOM feed to post to the fediverse, I create an account on my shrediverse.net GoToSocial instance, link that account to Mastofeed.org, and import the feed URL. Mastofeed will then handle posting each new entry in the feed to the GoToSocial account with a visibility of ‘Unlisted’ so that it doesn’t fill up the public timelines. This is a bit easier with music publications that already have an RSS feed. I can just add that to Mastofeed and off we go.
I’ve created a few accounts so far:
As I said before the posts have been made ‘Unlisted’ so you’ll need to
follow them from your fedi account to see the newest posts.
My next venture is to create a directory/wiki of all the band and publication accounts on this instance and make it searchable. I’d also like to create a form for people to request bands or publications they’d like to have accounts created for.