Support WebSub

[firestack]

Clients like FreshRSS by design don't refresh more than once per 15 minutes¹, while I don't anticipate needing to go back to my Feedlynx feed sooner than 15 minutes, supporting WebSub would provide a cleaner experience with the round trip between adding a new link, and being able to see it on clients.

Footnotes

1. FreshRSS does not, by design, supports pull refreshes at frequencies higher than once every 15 minutes. But FreshRSS supports instant push (WebSub).

   FreshRSS is part of an RSS ecosystem. A typical reaction that we have seen from several servers is to simply ban by, IP, user-agent, or to remove their RSS feed altogether. Bad user behaviours affect the larger community.

   ↩

[firestack]

FWIW, I'm not expecting this to be implemented now¹, I was just thinking about it and figured I'd open an issue to track the idea in case it's something the project would be interested in.

I'm also not certain that this is the correct way to implement some sort of event based updates for new feed items, but I figured it was worth a shot.

Footnotes

1. I'd be potentially interested in implementing it myself! But I haven't looked through the spec very closely yet. ↩

[wezm]

Interesting. Would require Feedlynx to manage subscribers to know who to notify. This would in turn imply needing to store that data somewhere. Could probably continue to use flat files. It would be worth knowing how broadly WebSub is supported to get a feel for how many clients are likely to benefit from the functionality too.

[firestack]

Would require Feedlynx to manage subscribers to know who to notify. This would in turn imply needing to store that data somewhere

From my read of the spec, I think this could start with publishing to a single WebSub Hub, and letting the hub manage the subscribers to notify. So when deploying you'd configure Feedlynx to publish to a specific Hub, and then publish the URL to that hub in the feed so that clients can go subscribe to that Hub. Which then leaves the option of having Feedlynx implement and become a Hub later, and defer figuring out the storage for managing the subscribers, or leaving that up to existing hub software¹ entirely but still being WebSub compatible.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/clone1018/WebSubHub ↩

[wezm]

Yeah ok that could work and sounds pretty simple.