Subcurrent RSS bot for Discord

Last week, an insta-click title popped up in my RSS reader: "An RSS bot in a group chat is our era's best salon". In the article, author Maya describes how having an RSS bot post to a group in Matrix has sparked private conversation around community members' public blog posts.

This seemed like an ideal call-to-action to add this ability to Subcurrent.

The driving motivation behind Subcurrent is to drive more visibility and interaction with content created by self-publishers in the Astoria Tech community. Bringing the content directly to where the community gathers online is a no-brainer.

So now, there are 3 ways to follow content aggregated by Subcurrent:

1. Go to the Subcurrent page
2. Subscribe to the aggregate RSS feed
3. Join the Astoria Tech #content channel on Discord

I won't describe the bot implementation in detail here since it's hyper-specific to our tech stack, GitHub Actions, and GitHub pages. But if you're interested in poking around:

• You'll need to create a webhook for your Discord instance
• Check out the "Send Discord notifications for new RSS items" step in our GitHub Action
• Check out src/utils/discordNotifier.ts

I haven't gone through a ton of trouble to style the output in Discord yet, but it's passable:

Ultimately, I hope this proves useful for bringing our local community closer together. We shall see.

As for Maya's questions:

Who else is doing this? What have you found? What is the right size of group? Are there any interesting technical tweaks that support what’s good about this?

As is obvious from the screenshot, I just got the Subcurrent RSS bot running this morning, so it's still too early to tell. But in terms of technical tweaks, I can imagine embellishing on the bot to encourage engagement and discussion. Otherwise, I wonder if this just turns into another feed to ignore.