Updates on building a feed-based social network

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was able to use a reference app to test rssCloud support for WordPress.com sites and WordPress.org sites. Since then, I have migrated some of the features in the reference app into a demo instance of MyStatusTool, the app I developed in 2022-2023 to provide a Twitter-like experience using rssCloud for notification. Here is a screenshot of the demo instance:

Currently, the app is subscribed to 11 WordPress.com sites, 1 WordPress.org site, and 6 non-WordPress sites. I did perform tests to confirm that all of these three types of rssCloud sites appeared within seconds on my demo instance. Woohoo! I will let this demo instance run for several days to check the re-subscribe function, but I think this is a good enough start to plan for a rollout of the feed-based social network.

My thoughts on Inbound RSS

Dave Winer recently wrote a summary of what he calls “Inbound RSS”, and Rob Fahrni and Manton Reece also contributed to the conversation. Rob had a great one-line summary in this Bluesky post:

Basically when you publish RSS that’s outbound. If you read it and do something with it, that’s inbound.

Now, where are some examples of this “in the wild” – who has this deployed? And why should we care?

As far as I know, the only service/tool that takes a RSS feed as an input and allows users to publish based on the content of that RSS feed is the Micro.blog service. I take advantage of this to publish posts from my WordPress blog that I want to appear on the Micro.blog timeline. Some platforms allow users to post via email (I found WordPress and Blogger, after a quick search). However, my impression is that people who have blogs use the interface provided within the blogging tool to create posts, and few people use alternate methods to post. So, from a quick search session, one blog tool that takes RSS as input to create posts.

In Dave Winer’s post, we can see that he wants to be able to post to other services (Substack, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky) by using an editor of his choice and providing a RSS feed to the service, which is then processed by the service into posts. This becomes even more clear after searching his blog for mentions of “Inbound RSS”. My response is: Good luck with that! Why should those services care, or make this available to users? What is the “win” for them. Moreover, what is good for the goose should be good for the gander, right? Of the blogging tools that Dave Winer has developed (1999.io, Old School tool within Drummer, Fargo), none of them has supported this feature. Why not?

In conclusion, I think that “Inbound RSS” as a publishing technique can be implemented by anyone (it’s only software, right? we can do anything in software, right?). Whether there is a business case for this, or a market for this, is for me an open question.

Reference: Paying for the development of software

Taking steps to build a feed-based social network

In a previous post, I mentioned that my vision of a feed-based social network included the use of rssCloud as the notification system within RSS feeds. Back in 2022, I did some investigation regarding support of the rssCloud protocol in WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites, and using FeedLand as the most prominent feed reader supporting the rssCloud protocol. It turned out that although WordPress.com sites had included support for rssCloud since 2009, and WordPress.org sites through the use of the RSS Cloud WordPress plugin, there was some misunderstanding about what a client needed to do to register with the WordPress rssCloud support. This Github gist goes into the details, but to summarize, the client trying to register with WordPress needs to be running on port 80 or 443 to be recognized. Both Feedland and the River5 feed reader (the two prominent feed readers supporting rssCloud notification) did not necessarily run on those ports, and as a result the “real-time” notification of rssCloud did not occur. Those feed readers were able to read the WordPress RSS feed and display updates, but not in real-time.

FeedLand was updated and now supports WordPress rssCloud registration. As part of that effort, Dave Winer created a rssCloud server demo project to use to check rssCloud server implementations. I decided to check this out with a WordPress.com site and a WordPress.org site using the RSS Cloud plugin. On my server, I am using the Caddy web server, and had some subdomains being hosted through Caddy. I updated the rssCloud demo code to use the port I am running on, and to use one of those subdomains with Caddy doing a reverse proxy so that the app would appear to be running on port 80. My test was successful! I was able to see the app register with both the WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites, and to see the app respond when the sites notified the app of a new post. Here is my copy of the main app and the stats file created by the app.

This is an important step in creating the feed-based social network I have in mind. WordPress is the largest generator of RSS feeds supporting rssCloud, so it is important to understand how the WordPress rssCloud implementation works to make sure that apps interacting in this social network can get real-time updates from WordPress sites.