Switch to FOSSgaming for the planet?

poVoq

There is this new page here: https://fossgaming.codeberg.page/ that is quite similar to our planet, but has some additional features such as Mastodon and Peertube feeds, and separates better between releases and blog posts.

As you probably know, our planet runs on Wordpress and uses a barely maintained RSS feed aggregator extension that is a bit of a pain to use. Therefore I have been thinking about alternatives.

The easiest would be of course to just shut down our planet and redirect to the above new page. But we could also fork the page and use it as a replacement for our planet. This would require running it through the f-hub.org Woodpecker CI (as it is a static page that is only checking the remote RSS feeds when rebuilt), but I am almost done with setting that up. (Edit: the CI seems to be working now).

One of the blockers is that it does not support RSS feeds itself, which we currently use with our IRC bot to post updates to the channels. But I think there are also some people that have subscribed to the aggregated RSS feed from our current planet with an RSS reader.

Any thoughts on this?

TPW

I open the planet two or three times a week and just scroll over it. The fact that I can read the entries directly there and do not need to enable javascript to use it are clear advantages over the fossgaming variant in my book.

nightm4re

As the maintainer of FOSSgaming, I think it serves a very different purpose than the planet. Just like @TPW said - the planet feels like an actual news site where you can read the articles in each feed directly. With FOSSgaming, I was going more for an approach that respects the official pages as the single source of truth: when you click a link, you're redirected to the official announcement.
FOSSgaming is not meant to be an RSS reader, but a hub that relays users to the original sources of information.
That's also why I was hesitant to let the page produce an rss feed, because FOSSgaming doesn't actually contribute any information - it's merely meant to distribute it. And if users need an exhaustive collection of rss feeds to consume in their favourite rss reader, for me there's not really a point in replicating the official feeds. For instance, the Linux Game Book has a consumable rss adress database already. It's been maintained for many years and provides all the links you could ever need to follow game updates via rss. That being said, I still have a working prototype to let my site produce a rss feed - it just requires a fix to an 11ty Plugin that has not been addressed for a few weeks now.

poVoq

Our planet also isn't meant to be an RSS feed reader. It is mostly an aggregator that happens to cache the articles due to the way the off-the-shelf software we use is written. But the majority of the users only seem to use it for aggregated news in a single feed and discovery of projects, which seems to be the same as what your website does.