I am not a developer and don't understand how this works. Can someone explain?
So this is a demo site for the app https://rss.chat
It's a kind of social network where everything is driven by RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
its the same technology behind Podcasts, you subscribe to it and when a new episode comes in, you GET it, instead of having to look for it right ?
so here it's the same concept, but around TEXT and interactions between people in the context of a "Chat app"
Concretely, when you wrote this question, you added your first entry to your own RSS feed on this demo site, I could take this feed and subscribe to it and then get your future new posts on my feed reader.
This is also valid for me, my reply to you is an entry in my own RSS feed, tied to my user/profile, anyone here using the demo can reply, each of their replies and the replies to their replies is going to be structured like a tree, properly threaded so that anyone could follow the conversation, even outside of here, in their own feed reader.
I tried to avoid getting into too much tech jargon so I hope my explainer is okay :))
We're starting to build a distributed social network using only web standards.
Key values: All parts are replaceable and Small pieces loosely joined, a term I stole from David Weinberger.
If I were to produce an all-inclusive fully developed centralized product, it wouldn't yield the result I'm trying to spin up, to bootstrap, which is how I work.
Podcasting, RSS, blogs -- all bootstraps like this. If you looked at my blog in 1994 and tried to extrapolate Twitter, you wouldn't get there, but each step is there, it should be so well understood at this point that I could simply say "Howard I'm doing a bootstrap."
So the part I'm working on right now is the group writing app. I've talked about this for years, I want an app for my friends and people I work with. But I don't think you have to sacrifice any of the global connections, that's what RSS is good at and we know how to build those systems.
There's a whole other side to my software kit, FeedLand, which can do the aggregation and can be connected to RSS.chat and all apps that are filling the same niche. And Feedly and NetNewswire, if they want, can play the same role.
That's why when you come here you only see 1/3 of the picture.
I had to open it up now because I want to get started on the community.
If this explanation helps, tell me -- and I'll ask Claude to write this up with all the ideas behind it. We've been careful to discuss every aspect of the product as it was developed.
But think of this software, rss.chat as web writing circa 2026 if we hadn't wasted most of the 20 years after Twitter.