We live in a fractured and polluted information environment. The sheer volume of content, combined with algorithms designed for engagement over enlightenment, can be overwhelming. Yet, within this chaos, there are countless people and organizations sharing fantastic, potentially transformative ideas. The challenge is finding them. This is where we can step in for each other, serving as filters to amplify these trusted voices.
For years, in my “Discovering Useful Ideas” workshops and videos, I’ve shared strategies on how to create “curated lists” on platforms like Twitter / X, Mastodon and BlueSky. In January 2017 I wrote the post, “Digital Literacy Challenge: Create an Information Filter Bot,” which described a 1.0 version of the software solution I’ve been working on several evenings this week rather intensely. My new project I’m sharing in this post, the Federated Reader Bot, is the next step in this journey.
I’ve been a huge fan of Flipboard since its founding in 2010; it’s my favorite way to read news on my iPhone and iPad. My “iReading” magazine on Flipboard, which I’ve curated for 15 years, now contains over 12,500 articles, videos and links… which have been “re-flipped” over 50K times by others. So when I envisioned a new iteration of this “news filtering and sharing” project, integrating with Flipboard was a logical goal. Since Flipboard is now “federated” and supports subscription to specific Mastodon lists (as it did for Twitter lists “back in the day”) I felt confident if I could figure out a way to auto-post my Gmail newsletter public HTML links into a Mastodon account / feed, I could view, enjoy and share those in Flipboard. I’ve been listening to Flipboard founder Mike McCue’s “Dot Social” podcast for several years now, and his thinking has definitely influenced my own in big ways about the fediverse.
The result of all this is now a Google Apps Script that acts as a “bridge,” using email—still the most important “common denominator” in our digital lives—to create a clean, curated output on the fediverse via Mastodon, with Flipboard as the beautiful front-end. The script (combined with a custom Gmail rule, detailed in the GitHub ReadMe file) automatically finds my newsletters in GMail, pulls out the main article link, and posts it to a dedicated Mastodon account. After subscribing to that Mastodon account in 1 of my own Mastodon account lists in Flipboard, my inbox has been transformed into a powerful curation tool in the fediverse!
Over the past few days, I’ve been “vibe coding,” initially with ChatGPT 5 and then with Google’s Gemini to bring this idea to life, working through a series of interations to build a functional script and solution. This took me three evenings of vibe coding, spending about 2 hours each night on the project.
I hope this “Federated Reader Bot project” can help you more intentionally and effectively consume, filter and share information online. I consider it part of my wider work with the “Heal Our Culture” project, because “re-taking” our news and information feeds away from the algorithms of BigTech is an essential step in the process of “de-polarizing” our communities, states and nation. This project also embodies the spirit of #OwnYourFeed, using a simple tool to help us curate and share the best of the web with each other.
If you’re interested in setting up your own DIY Federated Reader, the complete script and a step-by-step guide are now available on my GitHub. Please give it a try and let me know what you think! (A comment below would be great!)
* AI attribution: I used Gemini 2.5 Pro to draft and edit this blog post. I further edited, refined and linked the post before publishing. Find more of my AI experiments on ai.wesfryer.com
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