@randomMDN is suspended — what now?

[stefanjudis]

As you might have seen, the Random MDN twitter bot was suspended.

I'm very sad about this because random MDN pages did bring me a lot of value in discovering and learn about web platform functionality. So I'm looking for other ways.

A few things that I could think of:

• build a site with an RSS feed and receive random mdn pages this way
• move it to Mastodon and post there

If we're deciding on going with a site and an RSS feed, I could also see implementing a "voting" mechanism similar to Twitter because I've often scrolled through the tweets and looked at the number of hearts to find the most interesting pages.

Right now, I'm looking for ideas and opinions to build the best replacement. And maybe someone wants to help, too. 🫣

[paoloricciuti]

What about bluesky?

[stefanjudis]

IMO, Bluesky, Mastodon or whatever is cool next week should all be fed by an independent RSS feed used for cross-postings. :)

[robinpokorny]

Honestly, I'd welcome it as an email newsletter, too. Maybe weekly with multiple articles?

[rennerocha]

You can follow a Mastodon account in a RSS reader. So who wants Fediverse can use it, who wants a RSS feed can also use it.

[MaxArt2501]

Multiple feeds could be considered (Mastodon, RSS, newsletter...), but if I have to choose one Mastodon would be my pick, as you can consume it basically however you want.

[darekkay]

I think this would be a great fit for my Tip of the Day project (repository). It delivers a daily tip via RSS, JSON and HTML. The results are not randomized (as in Math.random) but shuffled, which ensures that you won't get duplicate posts until all entries have been posted. You can ping me if you want to collaborate or if you want to use my code to build something on your own (email in the footer of my homepage).

[schalkneethling]

@stefanjudis - I think the first question that needs to be answered here is, what would you like to see RandomMDN turn into? Do you want to keep calling it RandomMDN or perhaps something more general, like Random Web Bytes?

• Random Code Chronicles
• Web Developer Safari :)

Do you want to make something that can be consumed and shared to multiple platforms through something like Pipedream (https://pipedream.com/workflows) or turn it into a weekly newsletter, as others have suggested?

[jaandrle]

Hi all, I've created (originally) a cli for generating RSS feed into Newsboat.

A couple of days ago, I changed it "back" to a bot, this time for Mastodon (@randomMDN@botsin.space). The repo is https://github.com/jaandrle/randomMDN. As @rennerocha pointed out, any mastodon account has also RSS feed for free, but the timestamp is used for posts titles, which is probably not ideal – but the RSS feed exists.

[sujathareddy9]

Great