retrieve feeds individually

[sknebel]

In my traditional reader, I regularly access individual feeds in folders ("channels").

API-wise, this could be implementing by giving feeds a UID as well and allowing those as parameters in the action=timeline requests (and potentially others where it makes sense).

[EdwardHinkle]

I can see the benefit to this as well. While not used by every reader, I can definitely see a category of readers that would appreciate the ability to use it in this way.

[swentel]

I'm getting this use case more and more myself, usually in two situations:

• I'm in a channel, I see a post from a feed mixed with many others, but would like to see all posts directly from a certain feed.
• I would like to 'search' for all posts from a feed. If I know the feed url, I could enter the URL, or partially.

There's some brainstorming at https://indieweb.org/Microsub-spec#Searching_for_Content - if the value of 'query' would be a full url, the backend could decide to only match on that. However, that's a bit tricky IMO, so I like the idea of action=timeline, adding 'url' as another param where the value is the feed url: so action=timeline&url=https://aaronparecki.com/primary - Not sure if channel should still be passed on here.

I'm going to test this out with the Drupal IndieWeb module and Indigenous, making it optional in Indigenous via Settings.

[swentel]

I implemented this in Drupal and Indigenous. It's a setting in Indigenous to enable it.
Clicking on the author avatar opens all posts by this author/feed.

From a spec perspective:

• every microsub item gets a _source property, which contains the id of the feed. This is the internal id of the feed on the microsub server. Makes it a bit easier than using url imo.
• the microsub server accepts a GET request where action is timeline and a parameter source

Feedback welcome!

I'm going to add a (global) search too, but that belongs into another issue.

[aaronpk]

That's awesome, I've been wanting this too. How are you handling this in the UI?

[EdwardHinkle]

Right now he added where when you tap on a user’s avatar, it takes you to a view that shows the posts from their feed

[aaronpk]

Does it show what feed you're looking at somehow? what is it labeled? How do you get out of this view?

[EdwardHinkle]

Ohhhh, I see. Haha! Good question. @swentel? 🙂

[swentel]

Here's a quick (pixelated) video :)

• it opens a new activity and I pass on the author name for the individual feed. In case it's just a standard feed, you'd get https://example.com/rss

• it also shows how the search in a channel works, it passes on the search query string to a new activity (feedback welcome on Searching feeds and (proposed) searching content are close but different #33 for that)

[aaronpk]

I am looking at implementing this in Aperture+Monocle now.

I have a few multi-author feeds in my account, such as my Micro.blog timeline, Instagram timeline, and some Twitter searches. For those cases, the "source" feed is always the same. This implementation of using a "source" ID will end up treating these as a single source, which I suspect is not the end experience I'd expect. I think I'm going to implement this anyway to try it out, but that's something to keep in mind.

[aaronpk]

Since Monocle is completely stateless, I needed to add some information about the source into the response in order for Monocle to be able to display that. Here's a sample of my request and response now:

/microsub?action=timeline&channel=X&source=Y

{
  "source": {
    "name": "Name Here"
  },
  "items": [
    ...
  ],
  "paging": {
    ...
  }
}

(In the case of Aperture, the source name is actually a version of the URL, since I don't actually store any data about the names of sources right now. Eventually I'd like to have a better display name and also probably an icon.)

[swentel]

I also have a twitter feed where indeed the source id is the same. Indigenous/drupal can search as well, so instead of triggering individual feed, it could trigger a search on the author name. However, not sure if I can pass on that into the feed response to distinct between the 2 cases unless we introduce a new property on source level here, or let clients configure this. I would opt for the first option though.