Replacing Three Social Media Apps with One Using Skyscraper
Skyscraper is an app that supports Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, and standard.site in a single app that runs natively on IOS, Mac, Apple Watch, and more. But can it replace all the different apps I use for these purposes?
@fastfinge@pixelate holy crap, this app sounds amazing!! been using Indigo for Bluesky and Mastodon, but can't say I love it, there are still glaring accessibility bugs 4 months after I mentioned them and Skyscraper has so much more to offer anyway. just downloaded, off to poke around. thanks for the rec.
@fastfinge Oh really? I have seen it fail with a few websites where lire succeeds. Maybe I should take a second look after a few years. Wired, in particular, is something worth testing.
@fastfinge And has Miniflux been set up on your server? I ask this because I can't set it up like that because I don't have a server. And the Iranian ones are mostly crap.
@amir I read wired via Apple News, so I can't speak to that. But it succeeds with Arstechnica where Lire generally fails. And miniflux does support adding extraction rules, where Lire doesn't have quite as much advanced support there.
@fastfinge I tried the Apple News Wired stuff. when I was subscribed to it. But Apple News doesn't provide as many articles as I can get from Wired's RSS feed.
@fastfinge I once compared the articles almost a year ago, and the Apple side provides fewer articles. And a bit later than the actual RSS. Maybe things have changed.
@fastfinge And have you tried NY Times and WSJ articles for text extraction? BlindRSS and lire can't get them as both publications are quite serious about paywalls - LOL! Bookshare offers both - even their online articles outside the scope of the newspapers, but reading them full-text via RSS feels much better and is less time-consuming.
@amir The issue is that Lire uses its own server to do full text extraction. So it frequently gets blocked, because all the extraction requests come from one server that a website can just block by IP. Miniflux does it on your local server, so you're less likely to get your IP blocked by the website.
@amir The CBC, and my local Ottawa newspapers, are especially bad about using cloudflare and trying to block not only full text extraction, but even the reader mode in Safari. They really really want you to see those ads.
@amir If I were you, I'd install miniflux under WSL. Then you get its full text extractor, on an IP address you choose, and you can set up your own custom rules.
@fastfinge Do I still need a server for that? And I bet it should be based outside Iran because almost all Iran-based IPs are already hit by Cloudflair anyway.
@amir You could run it on your local machine and have it get articles via a VPN if you wanted. You just have to configure WSL on windows, then run miniflux inside it.
@fastfinge Thanks! This is something I'll be investigating shortly hopefully before the next round of war. I'm almost sure the next one will start soon either in a couple of days or in a week or 2.
@fastfinge He does need a win. But he must be overly stupid to get his hands wet in Iran for a second time before the midterms unless a surprise would be in order. This would be akin to suicide for him.
@amir Not really. If he can provoke Iran or someone into launching an attack against the US, he gets to either cancel the midterms entirely, or use it as fuel for his right-wing base to get them focused on revenge.
@fastfinge That's indeed a possibility. But the dictators here are smart enough not to give him the justification for an all-out war before the midterms.
@fastfinge Well, maybe the surviving ones now know how to hide under the proberbial rock more effectively. To me all of them, dead or alive, are a bunch of theocratic assholes. And sorry for the word.
@amir I mean from the outside, I'm not sure who's worse: them or Trump. At least you can generally trust the Iranian dictators to do what they say they're going to do, and not to do moronic things just because they can. Doesn't make them good. But it might make them better, or at least more reliable, than Trump.
@amir I mean, in a campaign speech he came out and told Iran it would be okay if they bomb Sanfransisco or LA. He says he was joking, of course. But i think it was like "ha ha only serious".
