Newsmast Brings Huge New Features in 3.0 Update
Timeline Integration, Developer API, and more!
Newsmast is a relative newcomer to the Fediverse, and their pitch is interesting: make it easier for people to find things they care about. The service pulls news, public statuses, and subject expertise from across the network, and filters it into communities for people to subscribe to. For example, here’s a timeline on the Ukraine Invasion, offering a combination of news articles, tidbits of insight from people talking about it, and media from the ground.
Today, Newsmast is taking a big step forward, releasing Version 3.0 of their platform.
What’s New in 3.0?
Newsmast is built on top of Mastodon, with custom development to provide a bespoke frontend with community feeds. While the platform has largely focused on itself the past two releases, 3.0 focuses on providing functionality for other Fediverse instances. This can be broken up into three different ideas:
- Timeline Integration – Users can now sign in to Newsmast with their own Mastodon accounts, and see their own server’s timeline mixed with Newsmast’s
- Developer API – People building Fediverse apps and platforms will be able to integrate Newsmast’s custom feeds
- Plug-in Server – a self-hostable Newsmast server for custom community feeds.
Timeline Integration
One of the more notable aspects of this new update is that Newsmast now lets users sign in with their own Mastodon accounts. In the past, it was possible to follow Newsmast’s community feeds on Mastodon through their newsmast.community instance, but now people can log into the service directly.
This feature brings is the ability for people to discover content from their own servers. From the blog post:
Users on big servers get a new, curated way of looking at the content in their home server’s
Federated timeline, and users on small instances get all that extra content without the need for
relays.
This sounds like a really great way to serve instances of any size, and feels like an innovative approach to discovery.
Developer API
Later this week, Newsmast plans to open up its API to developers, bringing in the possibility of building Custom Feeds directly into apps and platforms. This is somewhat evocative of what Bluesky does with their custom feed offering, or perhaps what Mammoth is doing with their Curated Feeds.
checkout @newsmast
They curate (with humans!) several topic-oriented #fediverse feeds. The accounts boost content that fits the topic, but like, actually fits the topic, not negatively sarcastic BS, always real content from across the fediverse.
They're actively building, and here is a sneak peak of a simple JSON API for listing the topic accounts
What’s interesting about this is the potential for third-party app developers to hook into ready–made feeds, which could greatly improve the onboarding process and help even the smallest instances find interesting stuff.
Plug-in Server
The most intriguing development today is an architectural shift: Newsmast is announcing what they’re calling a “plug-in server”, a type of supplementary service that hooks into an existing server to provide additional timelines.
Once the plug-in server is set up, content comes in via federation, using a mix of follows and
relays as on most servers. And while you move around and engage with all this content, your
identity, posts and interactions remain with your main account throughout.
It looks like the plug-in server’s main purpose is to allow admins to create their own custom feeds and communities, which in turn can then be discovered by other servers. Moving forward, the possibility of apps discovering custom feeds from plug-in servers could help bolster a feature that the Fediverse currently lacks. For the time being, it doesn’t look like the code has been released yet.
Overall, we’re really excited to see Newsmast grow, and bring these new developments to the Fediverse. Between Newsmast and Flipboard, it feels as though there are more opportunities than ever to discover amazing things across the network.
