Got an app supporting inbound/outbound RSS

Dave Winer recently posted asking developers working on apps supporting inbound/outbound RSS to send him a post on it, so here is my post. I created an web app in 2023 using rssCloud and supporting inbound and outbound RSS called myStatusTool. I have working instances of a Node implementation developed by me and a PHP implementation developed by Colin Walker.

From this thread on Micro.blog, it looks like someone is preparing an iPhone app with many of the same features (BlogWarp). Cool!

MyStatusTool development update

Late last year, I did some experiments with MyStatusTool to test use of async function calls to eliminate some startup errors I was seeing. Next, I did some tests of my ability to follow WordPress.com feeds. Eventually, I saw that I was not properly parsing the RSS server domain and path from the feeds. My prior setup had been for feeds using a separate rssCloud server for notification. The WordPress.com feeds use each WordPress site as the cloud server, so there is variation in the server URL. Now that has been worked out, my next step is update my startup logic to read the feeds, then parse the RSS server domain and path information. I may need to do more experiments with async programming again to get these steps to execute in a synchronous manner. See example installs here and here!

Taking another look at social networks and RSS

Today, Dave Winer wrote “What if you made a social network out of RSS?”. He then basically described a feed reader interface, and used examples from Bluesky and Twitter. However, I think that an important point of what people think of as “social networks” was overlooked or omitted. If you look at the Bluesky/Twitter examples, you can see that someone posts, and then replies are shown. I do not think that the “timeline viewer” that Dave Winer is “teasing” in recent posts is going to show or allow replies. The development of WordLand and its Baseline theme does not support comments or replies.

During the development of MyStatusTool, my collaborator Colin Walker proposed a namespace to allow replies via RSS. Perhaps this could be a stepping stone to supporting replies, and therefore conversations, via RSS. Just having a feed reader isn’t having a conversation, and isn’t particularly social. For other tools in this space, see my site The Feed Network.

Call for Twitter-like systems based on feeds

Dave Winer again calls for “a twitter-like system built with feeds, with all their limits”. In May 2023, I created My Status Tool (Github repo) using Node.js that provides the basic posting and reading functionality within Twitter, but using RSS and rssCloud as the enabling technologies. Colin Walker also created a PHP implementation (Github repo), and our two versions were able to interop. Dave also called for this back in December 2023 (my response), but from what I heard, Dave had some other ideas besides working with MyStatusTool. I don’t think that FeedLand is the system he was talking about, and I don’t think that Blogroll Social is the system either. Anyone interested in working on this?