Hi all! I’m messing around with a Lemmy news bot. I’m still testing and tweaking things but I made it live on !mews@lemmy.sdf.org and !worldmews@lemmy.sdf.org as of now.

The motivation behind this is partly just that I want to mess around with constructing Lemmy bots, but also, I feel like there are some features in a “here’s what’s going on in the world” community that aren’t real well-implemented by the current model. In particular, the bot aims to:

  • Batch up stories about the same topic into roughly-once-a-day roll up posts, so it’s not repeated low-urgency stories about Trump or Israel throughout the day
  • Post at a consistent controlled rate unless there’s breaking news which it tries to post semi-immediately
  • In the future I’d like to have it summarize the stories and provide links to background information and similar stories, Wikipedia or etc

Two questions: First off, are people okay with me doing this on SDF? The local feed seems like it has a really particular flavor, and I don’t want to be cluttering it up and crowding out the Unixy stuff, if that’s unwanted. It’s just as easy to set this up on some other instance if that’s preferable to the community.

Secondly, any feedback on the bot itself is welcomed as it starts to post (assuming people are okay with it). It’s a pretty simple thing, just scan some RSS feeds and post whatever the LLM thinks is most important, but like I say I’m trying to make it provide an improved quality-of-life for a news feed, so I’m curious what others think of the ideas.

Cheers, let me know. Thanks for the server, it’s grand.