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How about an RSS feed for tildes?
I've recently gone back to using RSS as a way to keep up with things that I like to follow, and I realized that it could be a good fit for tildes. I'm a developer by trade, so if other people are interested too I could even help with development (though not until I graduate in December, I'm slammed with work and school at the moment).
Any thoughts for or against RSS?
Thanks for the info, I'm still pretty new around here and I handn't realized that this had already been requested. Out of curiosity, does Deimos have a set plan for a go public date, or are we just playing be ear for now?
AFAIK that is roughly the plan, yes (although Deimos has said he doesn't intend to do anonymized public viewing). Although, as with most things on Tildes, all of that may change depending on what alternative ideas get proposed and how persuasive they are to Deimos. :P
E.g. Maybe Tildes stays publicly visible but invite only forever? Maybe it opens to public registration but people only get probationary/temporary accounts to start, with limited access to features (like only commenting but no voting, no tagging, etc)? Maybe those probationary accounts will require being "sponsored" by a trusted user to "level up" to a full account? Etc.
p.s. I'm not saying any of those ideas are particularly good ones or will come to pass... just that IMO there are many potentially interesting ideas that can be discussed and experimented with to hopefully find the right approach for Tildes going forwards.
I am all for public but invite only. The only way to maintain a healthy community is to make sure toxic people are not there. They are numerous and they don't care, nobody can deal with them once they are here.
WRT this issue at hand, I recall having asked about this myself too. I don't see why we need to wait going public for this, we can have RSS urls with private tokens like reddit does. We already have https, so that shouldn't be a security problem (or maybe it is, my knowlegde on software security is quite scarce). But they are convenient, especially for notifications (replies and DMs).
Oh yeah I agree completely. That's actually what I was hoping to hear, I think rushing to full public too quickly is not a good idea. I think the more time we spend carefully building the community the stronger it will be.
Would have to support authentication as the site is still private. I’m not sure which clients support auth.
I suppose it would depend on the approach taken. Ars has a "authenticated" RSS feed for subscribers, but it's actually just a query parameter that every reader (that I've tried, at any rate) can handle just fine.
Reddit does a similar thing to read responses you've gotten. So it's definitely doable, but it would just change after going public anyway.