Convener: Mike McCue (mike@flipboard.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• https://bumblefudge.com
• Jason Culverhouse (@JsonCulverhouse@flipboard.social)
• Seth: (@phillycodehound@indieweb.social, @s3th.me)
• Julian Lam (@julian@community.nodebb.org)
• Anca (@anca@mastodon.xyz)
• Varun (@vsanth@mastodon.social)
• Ryan Barrett (@snarfed.org)
• Freddie Johnson (@FreddieJ@newsmast.social)
• Samir Al-Battran (@samir@m.fedica.com)
• Saskia (@saskia@newsmast.social)
• Damon (@damon@social.wedistribute.org)
• Georgia (@georgiagemo@threads.net)
• Davide (@mala@fosstodon.org)
• Luis (https://www.lqdev.me, @lqdev@toot.lqdev.tech)

Notes

Website: https://surf.social

Goal: How might we make custom feeds fully open and standardized?

At least three things to standardize:

1. How should simple feeds like lists be public on a profile and shareable so anyone can see them?

   • Sharing feeds across people » Public and shareable on ActivityPub/Mastodon etc.

2. How can we standardize more dynamic, personalized feeds that have things like searches as sources, exclusions, algorithmic filters, recursive feeds, etc

   • Can we do something like “View Source” For the feed to understand the feed recipe

3. How can the feed recipe be shareable and portable between platforms and protocols?

   • Like OPML and interoperable and portable (e.g. What if I create a feed in BlueSky and I want to move it to Surf, or vice versa?)

Counterpoint: sharing “recipes” almost always devolves into sharing Turing-complete code, in one form or another, across independent servers that then have to try to run other people’s code safely and correctly. Difficult and problematic at best.

One big strength of existing examples of decentralized feeds like Bluesky’s is that they don’t standardize or specify the recipes. Feed authors can make feeds however they want; all they have to publish is the list of posts in the feed. This is important in that it preserves freedom and ability to innovate. Flipboard can let people make feeds differently than SkyFeed, etc, and they all still interoperate.

BlueSky has done some things to make it easier to standardize - you can create a custom feed and share it (But this is not standardized)

Experimented wtih building my own RSS started packs and leveraged OPML for portability and host them on my own site. This could include Fediverse and Bluesky but at the moment, it’s only blogs and podcasts. https://www.lqdev.me/feed/starter (i.e. AI https://www.lqdev.me/feed/starter/ai)

Definitions?

• Feed: a list of posts / a list of URI’s
• Accounts:
• Actor in ActivityPub: The unit of thing you can follow (user account with an activity stream, an RSS feed repeater, a group)
• Aggregator: query that collects posts in realtime/at fetch time
• Collection: a list of (?) in ActivityPub

An AP group maps pretty neatly to a BlueSky list in that it is JUST a collection of accounts/actors

Ryan: a problem is that in the Fediverse, actors are user visible. e.g. an actor can boost and you see it as “hiking posted something”: wouldn’t look natural and would be more activity updates and not really usuable.

Mike: Flipboard has had this issue and trying to figure that out.

Almost oversharing.

Anca: Feeds might not be in an order. Magazine shares particular order vs. Feed is filterable. People might want one or the other in different situations (e.g. top 20 favorited posts from yesterday vs. News from the Chocolate Kingdom)

BlueSky custom feeds: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

https://www.fediscovery.org/ – solves the hashtag issue?

Fediverse custom feed demo: https://michelcrypt4d4mus.github.io/fedialgo_demo_app_foryoufeed/#/login

Curation is key for custom feeds with criteria

Evan asks: should a feed always show up the same depending on when / where I’m looking at it?

• Bsky: displays these differently based on an individual person’s preference (e.g. how they select things to show based on hashtags, sentiment, etc)
• Their feeds are a recipe for what to show, not a specific thing being shown

When making feeds, feed builders want to be able to control what shows up at a granular level (posts, not just authors), depending on context.

Don’t over standardize. Make them interchangeable and rank and weigh differently.

Have the user have the control

De-duplication should be considered. Same post might (nor might not) show up in a feed due to multiple conditions (algorithms, hashtags, boosting by certain users)

Evan: Let’s bring the feed recipe standardization discssusion to the working group

• https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Jun/0006.html

Question: Where the federation starts… and talks to each other.

How do discover feeds?

From a publisher side, some questions:

• When I publish into a feed, what account do I use? (why do I have to think about that?)
• Do I have to have multiple social media accounts to be able to post?
• Can I aggregate the diffent “Me’s” across fedi into a single collection?

Links:

• Davide Eynard’s demo is here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mozilla-ai/byota for building a custom algorithm using AI sentiment analysis; February 2025 FOSDEM presi here
• Moderation prior art for distinct “helper software” that isn’t standardized but is designed in the open (partly on SWICG moderation TF calls!) here