I worked on a very basic feed, that will be used in Gluon in the next release, for the “discover more” section found in the app. Those are the emoji tagged topics that you can find on Micro.blog, including any word based topics too.

If anyone finds it useful and wants to use the same feed in their own app or service, you’re more than welcome to use it. If you do, let me know because I like to keep an eye on it - and I may change a few things around without notice… if I don’t know about you.

It’s super simple, and apologies in advance for the lack of code blocks on my site - will work on that!

To get the feed, head here:

https://gluon.app/feeds/discovery.json

It’s super simple, giving you the following data points in JSON:

• topic - The name of the topic.
• word - The lowercase topic name, which is used as part of the URL.
• emoji - The emoji, if available. Returns null if none.
• micro_blog_url - The full URL linking directly to the Micro.blog Discover URL for the topic.
• is_word_based - indicates if it’s something like “Micro Monday” which doesn’t have an emoji.
• is_featured - not yet used but am planning on using this in combination with the featured topics that come from the official feed, or my own preference to highlight certain topics - for example “WWDC” come this summer.

And that’s it really. Of note, the order of items depends how I set them - which is the way they show up in Gluon. So I’ll be tweaking that manually.

There is an option to query “emoji only” and “words only”, like so:

• For emoji only items: https://gluon.app/feeds/discovery.json?type=emoji_only
• For words only items: https://gluon.app/feeds/discovery.json?type=words_only

Good if you want to keep it separate.

I am planning to add categories to it also at some stage… but I’m getting ahead of myself once again!

As with everything in life I suggest you don’t rely on this feed being available all the time, even though this very rarely happens, because I do the occasional maintenance or other things out of my control. So I suggest you try and grab the data and save it on device and use the local data/model from that point onwards. Then try updating the feed and updating your local data/model accordingly. I also suggest you have a basic hardcoded list available to you if initial sync doesn’t work (just copy and paste my response) - and you can just use that until the server is back.

Anyway, I hope some of you may find it useful. I do! ✌️