If you moderate a community, and you want to get automatic posts from an RSS feed, now you can. It can be used for release posts for a FOSS project, infrequent blog postings that are relevant to your community, or things like that.

To do this, send a private message to bot@rss.ponder.cat. The commands are:

/add {rss_url} {community}@{instance} - Add a new RSS feed
/delete {rss_url} {community}@{instance} - Unlink an existing RSS feed from the community
/list {community}@{instance} - List all feeds for a community
/help - Show this help message

Please don't spam. You need to be a moderator of the community to modify its feed settings, but it's still possible for moderators to spam the rest of their instance with nonsense. Be a good Lemmy. If you'd like an RSS feed that's going to post a lot, and you want to separate it into a place where it won't invade the rest of Lemmy in a flood, send me a message and we can work it out.

Enjoy! Have fun.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 1 month ago

Am I right in assuming that - API wise - the bot only interacts with ponder.cat, and doesn’t make calls to the remote instance? (I’m wondering if there’s any barriers to it operating with communities that aren’t on a Lemmy instance).

Yes, that's right. It should work fine on a non-Lemmy instance.

Does the bot resolve the human first, check what they moderate, and then resolve the community if they moderate it, or just always resolve the community, and then compare its moderators with who made the request? If its the latter, this could be a way for bad actors to crowbar a community onto your instance (assuming it doesn’t purge it if things don’t match up, of course).

It's the latter. I think it's okay. The same thing can happen on any instance where someone can search for a community from any other instance.

What would have happened if Otter had sent /add https://lemmy.ca/feeds/c/medicine.xml medicine@lemmy.ca ? Would this be like that time when someone put ‘google’ into google.com, and the Internet blew up?

It's limited to one posting every 5 minutes per feed, so the damage would be limited, but you're right that it would enter an infinite loop and post once every five minutes until someone put a stop to it.