Adding support for adding rss/atom feeds would help make diaspora more useful and less lonely, and would be particularly helpful for encouraging use of diaspora while the network effect (not many of people’s friends are currently on diaspora) continues to work against it.
My suggested behaviour for this would be that users could add feeds in an aspect of their choice (but that they would go in a ‘web feed’ aspect by default). Users could add feeds either by pasting the address into the diaspora search bar, or through adding the feed directly from the browser (I’m not sure the technicalities of that but it should certainly be possible from e.g. firefox).
I would propose that this be made part of the standard diaspora behaviour, rather than as an app.
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I think this is potentially quite a good way to encourage uptake of diaspora and overcome some of the hurdles of ‘most people are currently not using it so it’s a bit lonely’!
Thank you for bringing this up! Awhile back, there was a user who had some “bots”, which operated like RSS feeds. You could message him, and ask to be added to one of the bots’ feeds; then, new posts from that feed would be added to your stream. I forget what the syntax was; “!subscribe xkcd-bot”, or something like that. It was pretty neat, and I remember thinking that this would be a cool feature for Diaspora to support officially.
Extending on this idea, you could allow comments on each feed-item. This way, small communities based around websites could spring up on Diaspora. So, a user could add “BBC News” to their feed. A link to a news story would appear in their stream. They could click on the link, read the story, and then join the conversation about that story on Diaspora.