A thing I’m noticing while adding a subset of these manually is that some of them are 403’ing, which might have interrupted the import process. I’ll document them as I come across them.
403 usually means that too many requests are being made to bluesky. I wouldn’t be surprised because unfortunately Newsblur has the tendency to make tons of requests at the same time all from a bunch of different IP addresses. The way Newsblur is handling the OPML import is likely causing the issue.
403 is “forbidden”, which should not be used for that purpose … and I’ve just experimentally verified that bsky.app will return 429 (rate limited) when you attempt to fetch too many urls too quickly (eg. to see which are returning 200 vs. 403 say via a shell-script loop, heh).
I could easily believe that NB is hitting rate limiting, but even just reducing the OPML to a single bsky feed that I’ve just manually verified returns 200 OK with rss does not seem to work.
Yes 403 is for forbidden but websites frequently use 403 to block when a client causes excessive 429s, which Newsblur tends to do unfortunately. Using 403s in this case are perfectly legitimate.
Ah. I had a feeling, but it was not obvious until I was adding some feeds via a different routine last night: I haven’t checked all of them, but I’m 99% sure that all of the “403” feeds are set to only be accessible to logged-in users.
I then wonder if there’s any way (for me) to provide some authn token on the RSS feed, or if NewsBlur can support user-specific feeds/bsky support in this case?
As well, it would be nice if the OPML import did not fail the entire import/batch for singular feed addition failures.
