There used to be Observation of the Day project journal posts, but they discontinued those a couple of years ago. I imagine they started posting those to social media instead to encourage sharing and interaction. And while I don’t fundamentally disagree with that change - I do feel it is for the better - it’s great for the users of the big three social media platforms, but leaves the rest of us in the dark. iNat may be underestimating exactly how many people are not being reached by only posting on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
As for iNat increasing the visibility of Observation of the Day on their site, I would like that, too! But I think a key issue is that the more posts you give high visibility on the site, the more likely it is that users will miss the really important ones, as they might be flooded out by all of that additional content. Maybe some sort of sub-channel for that could work to provide the additional content when you visit the journal page itself, but have the website sidebar only include the main blog posts and not the other stuff. Just a thought.
Yeah, this. But note the last journal post date in 2021. Having the Discord bot post observations from this project is not a big deal - we could do that, and then users could interact by clicking the link, adding the observation to their faves, and leaving a comment. But sadly, as I indicated earlier, we would be missing out on the nice comments from staff about each observation.
Have you considered using the Fediverse? That is a collection of open and decentralized alternatives to commercial plattforms. There are for example Mastodon that works like Twitter and Pixelfed that is like Instagram.
Ah, right you are - I was aware the Week posts were carried there, but had somehow conflated that with the Day posts which I thought went to the journal before. But yes, I see it was only the Week posts that went to the journal before.
That would be entirely up to iNat. As I alluded to in my original post I’m aware Mastodon has been discussed before on the forums. While there is a lot of interest from individuals there, it was pointed out in that thread that it comes down to it taking time to do for iNat to have a presence there. So I’m not really pressing for a solution in that direction.
Have you tried surveying your Twitter readers to see where else they are on social media. When you move away from the ‘first social media’ the options explode and readers scatter to their new, preferred choice. I still use my preferred slice of FB (which includes obs of the day), but slid from Google Plus died to iNat eats even MORE time.
doesn’t it just use the free web API as a backup route if you haven’t self-hosted with a Developer key? in other words, isn’t this going to have the same problems as you accessing Twitter directly?
unfortunately i think twitter is, or is soon to be, a total loss. I liked twitter a lot and there were communities on it that were important to me. But it’s completely broken now, the algorithm intentionally sends specifically unwanted things, it’s now impossible to tell which accounts are verified and which are fake, and many of the good people are left. Sad as it is to say it, i don’t think there’s any sense in spending any dev time on twitter, if it even continues to exist it’s going to be useless for years if not forever.
I tried getting into mastodon and i just can’t. it doesn’t keep my attention and the app i have is clunky and the content, while its got good people, doesn’t spread the way it does on twitter. I don’t think it really works as a twitter replacement. I want it to, but i’m not convinced.
I guess for now i’m just on a mostly social media break.
I didn’t have time to look into it, but that’s what I’m afraid of.
edit: My fears are somewhat allayed by the thought they might be sufficiently well-supported by contributors to pay the $100/mo to keep operating the site.
if i’m reading things properly, the basic tier allows 10,000 pulls. how far does that go? will Twitter negotiate an enterprise license for these guys knowing that they drive viewers away from the site (and thus reduce ad revenue)?
Hmm, true. I didn’t think about the volume they handle being a bit much for rsshub if they’re only on basic. Well, it’s anyone’s guess at this point. My takeaway is that being able to pull tweets off of Twitter in the future is uncertain, so if I invest any further effort into this, it should not be to get Twitter working, but instead to fill in the missing bits as much as I can by other means. That probably means:
use the iNat blog atom feed
supplement the feed with new observations (sans staff comments) as they appear in the Observation of the Day project
And that’s about it. We end up with an 80% solution that delivers some of the content formerly obtained from Twitter for the time being. I’m inclined to rename our channel from #inat-tweets → #inat-social reflecting the move away from Twitter, and just be on the lookout for ways to improve the postings in that channel as time allows.
You don’t know how many drafts of this post I discarded that expressed similar sentiments about Twitter and what they’re doing to communities that depended on them! It’s truly a shame. But ah well, what can we do? Just doing my best now to serve our community the best I can … if Twitter doesn’t want to be a part of that anymore, I’m not losing any sleep over it.
The value added by aikaterna’s rss cog is that it deals with stuff like decoding the html-entity-encoded payload of the html format tags (via feedparser) and further parsing the tag contents (e.g. via bs4, finding all the <img> tags) and then outputs it into a nicely formatted Discord embed, formatted with a user-configurable template string.
