Timeline
Posts from the instances this one federates with
-
A peptalk for devs.
http://scripting.com/2026/07/18/143021.html
I just started writing about where we are, one week after launch.
Yeah it's only been a week! :-)
-
I still think there needs to be a setting to allow users to set a default view of threaded. The way that rss.chat does this is the same as micro.blog and twitter before it amd all are inconisted with message boards and bbs The challenge is working out notification of threads that have been updated. I would just bump the parent and responses up to the top. I think fundamentally threaded messages and rivers/timelines are incompatible but that may just be me.
in my mind chat is real time messaging, which is not this. To me this is more accurately described and a message board / forum that uses rss. RSS really doesn’t need to be in the name beyond making a point.
And chat / messages is not writing and I don’t know why Dave is so obsessed with merging blogs and chat. Besides what he claims to want Manton already did. -
This is a test post for an experiment claude is running.
-
👋 alice.textcaster.app got it over plain RSS — no shared API, no shared DB — and is replying. {{FED-EBT7LA}}
-
Hello World ! 🙂
-
shape probe [[XZ1]]
-
federation primitive check
-
Well... rss.chat has a sibling or a cousin, not sure :) https://textcaster.app
-
Changes in the feeds rss.chat generates
-
BTW, never in a billion years will any of my software ever require a title.
-
Test new post after cache clear in the browser.
-
I was obliged to add this title to be able to publish
Test without title -
This is a test. This item does not have a title.
-
Replies in the timeline
@dave, is there a description of the heuristics rss.chat uses to display Replies?
AFAICT it's:
- initially a flat list of messages sorted by timestamp.
- first click on the right arrow next to the Reply icon, morphs the list to show conversation thread under the item, moving items to avoid duplicates.
- second click on the same arrow hoists the item, replacing the list with the item's conversation thread.
Is above accurate?
PS: I couldn't post this without title, likely Publish button gating issue. -
New feature.
If you open a second copy of rss.chat in a different tab, the version you left behind will put up a dialog saying you can either close the tab or reload the page.
This keeps us from losing data. ;-)
- Congratulations for solving the puzzle.
-
Feed discovery
-
Image support? Yes.
BTW, I told Claude yesterday that we will support images in posts. I wanted it earlier when chaos still ruled (believe me it was very hard to use at this time) and it talked me out of it, saying it was too expensive.
I don't think it will be too expensive. And if it does, then we'll find a way to get money flowing through this project without holding things up.
-
When we're talking about the rules for interop with rss.chat, is there a specific name we're using? Like, would it be an "rss.chat" WordPress plugin?
I read the interaction here: https://demo.rss.chat/?id=57 and the part where you said "treat comments as blog posts with their own permalinks" made me wonder, because this is not a rule from Textcasting.
For instance, I could in the main feed add `` and link to a comments feed (like https://test.geekity.com/2026/07/16/hoopla-world/feed/), but those comments don't have permalinks, just an anchor tag to the main post. So this wouldn't be compatible?
- My Second RSS Chat Membership - but my first 'Production' membership.
-
Now running the app using the npm forever package.
-
My first post
This is my first post on my rss.chat instance
-
"goodnightkiss" messages coming tomorrow
Tomorrow the plan is to add a new websocket-based way of making sure that only one copy of rss.chat is running at the same time. When you log on, on another computer or even on the same computer, this creates another copy of appPrefs.
If you change something, they get saved to the server. Meanwhile on another machine it doesn't have the new version, it has values that you don't want to write over the ones you changed on the other machine.
So when you log on, the server sends a "goodnightkiss" message to every copy it's connected to with your username. They then put up a dialog saying if you want to continue using rss.chat you have to reload.
All this is working in WordLand and FeedLand, so it's pretty likely it'll work right away. I know that sounds cocky, but that's how it's been going. It's like Claude is both a compiler and runtime, and I haven't seen any mistakes go by it without it catching them.
-
I've been thinking about the
source:accountelement. Havingserviceas a string like "instagram" makes sense because it's a single instance. For "mastodon" it's okay because the domain of the service is in the username. But I'm wondering if this will become an issue as more small services get spun up.Should
servicebe a URL to the service homepage? Maybe the service is on a specific port or running from a folder on the server. I know there isn't anything in the spec that says it can't be a URL, but would it be useful, since this is being parsed by a feed reader?If we want to keep it just a label for the service, should there be an optional
urlorhrefelement linking to the service homepage? -
New sub-menu on Docs menu
Title of the menu -- RSS & OPML.
Links to the RSS 2.0 spec, the OPML 2.0 spec, source namespace and the RSS as a social network walkthrough.
-
A feed icon on every post
There's now a feed icon on every post.
When you click it a new tab opens with the post, ready to paste into your feed reader.
A blog post with a screen shot and explainer.
-
Feed URLs change
The URLs for the feeds have changed. If you haven't subscribed to any of the feeds here, you don't need to do anything. But if you have, you should read this note, and subscribe via the new URL and unsub from the old one.
-
Simpler instance-starting
We just converted both rss.chat and demo.rss.chat to use a different storage system, instead of using Amazon S3 to store the feeds, we're storing them in our database. So instead of there being two domains for on system, now there's only one. Cuts out one of the most complicated parts of setting up a new instance.
So if this works, it will show up on the blogroll on Scripting News, which is watching the old url, which should redirect to the new one.
-
There's a Docs menu, so now I have a place to put links to docs. Coming soooon.
-
Another Idea, this time regarding authentification :
it would be probably trivial to enable IndieAuth authentification on rss.chat, this would allow me for example to auth with my own website, using my own h-card to provide, email, username, etc. this would allow anyone supporting indieweb building blocks to login without bothering with email or with more complex SSO dependency (github, google, etc)
-
Another idea that I'm thinking out loud as I write this down :
What if I could get a notification if/when someone directly replies to me, either using websub or perhaps an external notification provider (ie: ntfy.sh)
-
Just thinking out loud, but... if I subscribe to the "everyone's feed" https://users.rss.network/rss.xml in my RSS reader, I obviously see each entry, but there is no way to know who is the owner of the post.. if we'd push this idea further down the road of a "social network powered by RSS" I would love to be able to see right upfront "who" is the author of the post, a bit like we do in the rss.chat UI, i guess this is why the "client" exist, but I was wondering if we could make ANY rss feed reader able to display "rss.chat" streams with proper user attribution
-
In setting up the new server I forgot to configure the location of the S3 files for the feeds so we were overwriting the feeds for rss.chat.
When I post this, my personal feed and the everyone feed should rebuild and be good.
-
Awesome work Dave (@Dave Winer)!
As the new guy here I sure hope I don't come off as a curmudgeon (yes I'm old but I'm not bad- tempered ;-) ), but I opened issue #3 on the repo. I was trying to respond to @Ricardo on my iPhone when I couldn't. After drinking my coffee, I realized I wasn't logged in. After finishing my muffin, I realized there was no way to login in. Now it's lunch time and I've posted an issue. I almost feel bad for doing it - like picking nits. I'll go quiet. I'm going to eat my sandwich.
-
Feel free to test
Here is the localhost/vps deployment if anyone wants to test it : https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/issues/2