About

Adding a feed

Every bot is one entry in feeds.yml. Suggest a feed by opening a pull request — or an issue with the URL if you would rather not.

1. Edit feeds.yml and add a block under bots::

     example_blog:
       feed_url: https://example.com/feed.xml
       display_name: Example Blog
       summary: What the blog is about.
       profile_photo: https://example.com/avatar.png  # optional
       default_hashtags: [Electronics, Retrocomputing]  # optional, max 3

2. The key becomes the handle, so it must be lowercase letters, numbers, or underscores.display_name is capped at 100 characters and summary at 500.
3. Run pnpm validate-feeds to check the schema and that any profile_photo is a reachable image. CI runs it too.
4. Open the pull request. The bot goes live the next time the server deploys.

Removing a feed

If you publish a feed here and would rather not, delete its entry in a pull request or open an issue and it will be removed. The bot account is deleted and its posts are withdrawn from the Fediverse.

How the fetcher behaves

If you run a site listed on the status page, this is what you will see in your logs:

• It identifies itself as robot.villas RSS poller/1.0 (+https://robot.villas/about).
• Each feed is fetched at most once an hour.
• Requests are conditional (If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since), so an unchanged feed costs you a 304 and no body.
• A 429 pauses that feed until its Retry-After has passed.
• Only titles and links are reposted, each crediting your feed with a link back.