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?

  • th3raid0rOPMA
    2·
    1 year ago

    That’s the reason for the different communities I suppose. The intent was that if you didn’t want to see a constant stream of news, then just unsub from /c/localnews. I guess the main difference is that people use the ALL feed a lot more often, and not the SUBSCRIBED feed as one would think. Because of this, tucson.social would frequently saturate other instances ALL feeds and annoyed a lot of folks.

    There is a setting to disable all bot posts, but that’s not what folks really want either.

    It seems that the broad fediverse consensus seems to be around all bots should be invoked directly by a user or post mention. No bots should post completely automatically save for a few megathread/event sorta things. This would make things like newsbot bad (except for the monthly/weekly events one), and would mean things like a bot that automatically converts community references into links are good.

    Here’s the thread where a lot of the discussion took place - https://tucson.social/post/67731