a thought that just resurfaced: it'd be cool if mastodon / the fediverse at large had some kind of standard way to surface people's blog rss feeds and the like.
like remember how facebook used to let you publish a feed? that was of course a stepping stone to their enclosure of the web - but what's, like, the conceptual inverse of that? a thing that uses the energy here to build the whole open-web-glued-together-by-some-protocols side of things instead of trying to eat it?
@brennen Since I use a static site generator, I was able to put together a template that makes my blog emit ActivityPub data.
It took me about an hour. If I can do it with Pelican, it shouldn't be much harder to do with Jekyll or WordPress.
@starbreaker i've kinda played with that idea. it looks reasonably manageable.
is your template source public somewhere? i might take a run at doing that with https://github.com/brennen/wrt one of these days.
@brennen It's all on Github. You'll want to start in the oedipus directory.
@starbreaker @brennen That's pretty darn neat. I should do that for my hugo site (sadly neglected).
I guess the 'following' collection is basically a blogroll?
Is there any way to actually follow your feed from Mastodon? With remote subscribe somehow?
I should make a plug-in for my favorite blog thingie to publish posts as Activity Pub thingies 
As you can see I am very 
@alice How do you build your blog? WordPress?
@alice PicoCMS uses Twig for templates, right? You could probably just take my templates and modify them to use variables emitted by PicoCMS. They're available from my GitHub repository.
@starbreaker _nod_ bookmarked
@alice If you get around to it, please let me know how it turns out. :)
@starbreaker Will do :)
@starbreaker I haven't done anything yet... just set up the repo https://github.com/acarback/picocms-activitypub/tree/master
@alice That's fine. Take your time.
@starbreaker @brennen How would one go about using that from something like Mastodon? AIUI you need to be able to POST to followers' inboxes for them to see the content you post under normal circumstances. I'm note even sure what if anything Mastodon uses the outbox for since I often can't see any toots on people's profile pages from within Mastodon itself.
@starbreaker @brennen you mean ActivityStreams data. if it can't accept or transmit POST requests then it's not doing ActivityPub
@nightpool @brennen Thanks for the correction.
@brennen WebFinger allows quite a bit in the returned JSON Resource Description file, including a list of links to other resources. It would be great to have your blog, or even other social media profiles, entered into your Mastodon profile and then accessible via WebFinger.
@brennen oh, and it looks like the latest Mastodon release actually adds support for custom profile fields, so this functionality is already a step closer, yay?
@brennen I'd love an easy way to make RSS bots like this one: https://mstdn.mx/@CommitStrip
Actually, I don't know whether making that bot was easy. I should ask.
@brennen So I dunno about the CommitStrip bot but I found another one that follows RSS feeds (https://botsin.space/@newsbot) and it's about 140 lines of code. That seems very much in reach for beginner/intermediate programmers, but I'd love to have this functionality available to non-programmers. Ideally you shouldn't have to keep a server running.
@DawnPaladin yeah, i think rss bots sort of aren't exactly what i'm looking for anyway, though i guess that leaves me without a super-coherent explanation of what i _am_ looking for.
@brennen I agree, RSS bots don't seem like a perfect fit. You should develop this idea further - I think it's a good one.
(this thought brought to you by how often people here have interesting blogs and stuff that i didn't know about.)