RssTooter

This a fork of GoToSocial an ActivityPub social network server, written in Golang. The goal is to patch it to allow to work as an RSS aggregator.

This is done by :

• On a webfinger query if the user does not already exist try to create one using user data from Nitter
• For all users created this way will start polling every rss-poll-frequency.

Webfinger query

Since Mastodon support a limited char range (ATM [a-z0-9_]+([a-z0-9_.]+[a-z0-9_]+)?) it's not possible to directly pass the url through Mastodon.

The idea is to call the webfinger directly using curl for example, the endpoint will return a username that can be used in mastodon.

The winfinger will:

• Remove the @server_host if present
• Check if the lefovers are an existing account name.
• Add https protocol if needed and call the resulting url to check if it's a Feed (Atom or Rss).
• If not load the page HTML and search for:
  • A link element in the header with type="application/atom+xml"
  • A link element in the header with type="application/rss+xml"

The returned user will be either a pretified version of the url if short enough or the host appended with an xxhash of the query path and parameters.

Ex:

Mastodon
> curl 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/.well-known/webfinger?resource=xkcd.com'
{
    "subject": "acct:xkcd.com@127.0.0.1:8080",
    "aliases":
    [
        "http://127.0.0.1:8080/users/xkcd.com",
        "https://xkcd.com/atom.xml"
    ],
    ...
}
> curl 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/.well-known/webfinger?resource=codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases.rss'
{
    "subject": "acct:codeberg.org.14499953154663570662@127.0.0.1:8080",
    "aliases":
    [
        "http://127.0.0.1:8080/users/codeberg.org.14499953154663570662",
        "https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases.rss"
    ],
    ...
}
> curl 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/.well-known/webfinger?resource=@codeberg.org.14499953154663570662@127.0.0.1:8080'
{
    "subject": "acct:codeberg.org.14499953154663570662@127.0.0.1:8080",
    ...
}
> curl 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/.well-known/webfinger?resource=codeberg.org.14499953154663570662'
{
    "subject": "acct:codeberg.org.14499953154663570662@127.0.0.1:8080",
    ...
}

Setup

Note: since the goal is to make minimum change to the project to be able to continue updating the gotosocial base, the package was not renammed.

mkdir -p ~/go/src/github.com/superseriousbusiness
git clone https://github.com/Timshel/napp.git ~/go/src/github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
cd ~/go/src/github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
yarn install --cwd web/source
yarn --cwd ./web/source build

./scripts/build.sh

cp example/config.yaml config.yaml
./gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml server start
./gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml admin account create --username admin --email toto@yopmail.com --password 'Password'
./gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml admin account confirm --username admin
./gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml admin account promote --username admin
./gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml server start

Systemd example file:

[Unit]
Description=RssTooter
After=syslog.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple

# set user and group
User=rssTooter
Group=rssTooter

# configure location
WorkingDirectory=/opt/rssTooter/live
ExecStart=/opt/rssTooter/live/gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml server start

Restart=always
RestartSec=15

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target