Server v0.5.23. There's a new call, /getiteminfo — it answers the question a feed can't: what's at the other end of a source:inReplyTo link. Give it the address of any post and it returns the post as JSON.
curl "https://rss.chat/getiteminfo?guid=https://rss.chat/?id=204"
You can pass id=204 instead of the guid if you have the post number. There are two formats, chosen with the format param:
rss, the default — the item in feed vocabulary: description, guid, account, inReplyTo, comments and source, the same names and structures you see in our feeds. If you can read the feeds, you already know how to read this.
feedland — the internal record, the same structure our firehose broadcasts, compatible with FeedLand. Flatter, with ids and counts you can use directly.
Asking for a format that doesn't exist gets an error saying so, and asking for a deleted post gets the standard Can't view the post because it has been deleted. — errors are always an object with a message property.
There's also a new place to start reading about all of this: RSS as a social network, a walkthrough that tells the story of one real conversation — a post, its replies, and the feeds that connect them — one element at a time.