Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

I've been building https://mentions.us for the last couple of months. It's a little web app that monitors Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, Hacker News and a bunch of other sites for keyword mentions. Not an original idea (F5Bot has existed for at least 8 years) but a fun project, and I think it can make a contribution by monitoring more sources and having a free tier that includes sending Slack messages.

It has taken a couple of months to go from idea to a product that's polished enough for other people to use, and I've been full time on it. It has a couple of dozen companies using it now, almost all from the last couple of weeks. That's been a big boost!

I think an AI powered f5bot is needed. Curious to know that are you integrating API of these platform or some other way?

Yeah, it's on my list. When you're scanning sites with high volume (Reddit has ~300 posts per second, Bluesky has ~100) you have to keep things fast and cheap, so I think keywords still have a role, but I think they can become an implementation detail.

My plan over the next couple of months is to build the option for users to enter the kind of things they want to scan for, have AI convert that to keywords, use the keywords for the (fast) scanning, and then apply additional filtering using AI to the small number of posts that match.

Not built yet, but I think there's a bunch of promise to using AI to find relevant conversations online.

Re: APIs, yep, all APIs. I'm not doing any web scraping at the moment