It does seem like it was manageable with just one feed, but adding tucson.com to news and politics seems like a mistake in hindsight.
My intent was to make it easier for everyone to find local news in those relevant channels without having to go through the process of searching for and sharing the article themselves.
However, a thread over at beehaw suggested I was really saturating their feeds with tucson news in a way that was unwelcome and inauthentic.
We have grown, and people are beginning to post their own content here, should the bot stay or go?
We can also just cut down the amount of feeds we’re subscribed to. I just thought I needed to be more balanced, by offering at least one more source alongside Tucson Sentinel.
That being said, when we were just subscribed to Tucson Sentinel, the rest of the fediverse didn’t seem to mind due to the less hectic pace of their posts. So that’s an option as well.
Alternatively, and this is the one I’m leaning towards the most.
I’ll keep the thisistucson.com feed for the home page, that’s been fairly useful and matches the /r/Tucson precedent.
I’ll also keep the Tucson Sentinel local politics feed, it’s been VERY good at keeping people informed of upcoming civic duties and I think that’s a very important thing a bot can do. Help us with the boring crap!
That would return the news feed back to the users entirely and reduce the politics feed by a lot.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
I honestly don’t like the news bot at all. No one posts on its threads and it’s impossible to engage with others on Tucson.social through the noise of all its posts. And honestly, thirdly, if you want to grow this instance with real people you have to leave them something to post, and that is going to be mostly interesting news people want to discuss. Maybe if you restricted the bot to one news thread a day where it posts all of the news articles at once. That and the monthly “what’s going on in Tucson this month” threads wouldn’t fill up the feed as much.
I’d have to modify the bot significantly in order to post all the news in a single thread, but that is certainly an idea!
Understood, but there is definitely an issue with the server growing enough to get enough local engagement in the first place. Almost sort of like an invisible wall of engagment that must be passed before more and more people actually contribute.
The thought was that “news” is boring for the most part, why not automate it? Back on /r/Tucson local news was a very small percentage of posts, most people engaged more on the typical “What’s the best X restaurant”, “Look at this pictures of the Catalinas!”, and other local goings on that the bot just won’t do. So I was hoping that I could bring the news and that folks could bring the other things - with a net positive as a result.
Obviously things are a bit more nuanced, and the news articles didn’t really drive any engagement that wasn’t about news.
Oh well! Do let me know if you like or dislike my more recent changes to pare it back a bit.