Fediverse welcome 🙌
in the era of the post-social network aftermath…
As a beginner on the whole fediverse concept I felt fascinated by it since it appealed to me like something reminiscent from my early days of contact with the internet and the online social experience.
The context
I have always tried to look for ways to have a curated news feed, either by the use of news apps such as Flipboard (among others), or more recently trying to curate my own newsfeed selection using RSS reader apps and sourcing content directly from websites I know and visit.
Another test I made was to follow news media official channels on social networks, but that seemed a bit too crowded for me, as I would get timeline pollution receiving all content from a source, instead of the topics I was interested in.
Overall I started thinking that there should be a more unified way to get content directly linked to sources, without clutter, and more streamlined with my media consumption habits.
And since I tend not to share too much about myself on social media, and instead use it as a source for reading material and updates, why not take leverage of the same rss feeds already existent and have them delivered the same way I browse through other authors’ publications?
The process
I had no idea what I was doing. In fact, I still don’t know if I currently do.
The draft idea was to get the source rss feeds I was most interested in, filter through to only get selected topics, and have that “delivered to my doorstep” as I browsed through content.
While simple enough, this would involve a few steps in order to get it automated after some initial configuration.
I came across a video from networkchuck (link down below) where he went through the overall startup process of using n8n for automating tasks and flows, and although it was all brand new territory to me, it seemed like a robust solution to start learning from.
Granted, n8n has far more features than what I would eventually use for my workflow, but I looked at it from a perspective of learning to work with a tool that can potentially be useful in other future projects.
Its vast number of ready to plug integrations (and all others you can connect to) and ease of usage, combined with a relatively flat learning curve, make a compelling argument to use it as a base for what I was looking to achieve.
I also required some place where to setup and run n8n, and while my homelab could provide an eligible starting point, the hassle of configuring n8n to run on a local device and connect to external sources was what eventually led me to evaluate cloud-based solutions.
(You can check this small piece I wrote a while ago If you want to know more about homelabs and what you can do with older computer hardware)
While there are plenty of providers for cloud-based installations, I eventually chose to setup an account using Claw Cloud Run (I was new to the service and wanted to try how it worked. I’m sure there are many other eligible providers, and you can easily find tutorials for each of them on deploying n8n and configuring it somewhere in the internet.)
From there on, I chose a few sources of content to scrape from and established ground rules for:
- Getting content only when it detects changes;
- Filter content from certain topics;
- Breakdown publishing into smaller batches (so it doesn’t break the free-service limitations);
The result was a clean flow, that after some tests revealed to be fine-tuned enough for public release. I’m planning to add more sources to it as time goes, but for now I’m still testing for stability and content segmentation.
Conclusion
I’m sure there are multiple ways to achieve this, I just wanted to do it as a weekend project and to try a new tool. So far I have been quite impressed with n8n and the plethora of integrations it supports just out of the box. The depth of integration with IoT and tasks automation is only limited by what you can draft and connect.
So far this has been a fun project, that I’ll be making small incremental changes to now and then, but for the most part I’m just glad to have a curated news feed for my content, that I can browse while on Mastodon.
You can check out the outcome here and follow it if you would like a Portuguese newsstand to be part of your social experience.
