Feed Network – Andy Sylvester's Web

Does Dave Winer really want a RSS-based social web?

Andy — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:57:13 +0000

I am sorry to have to continue this thread, but there are more developments to assess. In a followup, Dave Winer shares he does not get much in the way of views of his content on Twitter. He then tells Ben Werdmuller (and the rest of us) that “we have to create our own social web”.

Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it! If someone wants to have a social web based on RSS, they are going to have to create it themselves, instead of trying to “boil the ocean” and get every other social network software platform to add features to use RSS as the transport mechanism for social network applications. Then, they are going to have to convince other people to use it instead of existing social network software.

From the Mastodon About page, Eugen Rochko created Mastodon in 2016 because he was “dissatisfied with the state and direction of Twitter”. That was 9 years ago! Mastodon as an application has taken a long time to reach the position it holds today. rssCloud has been supported in Dave Winer’s blogging tools since 2001, and rssCloud support was added to WordPress in 2009 (see reference here), but there has been almost no uptake of rssCloud as a basis for blogging or social network tools. Perhaps part of the reason why is how Dave Winer responds to negative feedback on his tools in a negative way (examples: Feedland and Drummer).

I have described what a social network should have, and that definition covers all current social networking applications. Dave Winer gave his own description of a RSS-based Twitter app in January 2025, and it matches up pretty well with the app I developed, My Status Tool (demo version, repo for code). I also created a portal site for RSS-based apps for social networking (The Feed Network), so there is a place for people to get started (but I do not see it as my mission to try to evangelize this area). Dave has talked about what his new vision would be using WordLand (September 2025), but this “new vision” is nowhere to be seen. Show us the beef!

Taking another look at social networks and RSS

Andy — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 02:44:01 +0000

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.

Use case: linkblogging from your phone

Andy — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:59:02 +0000

I use my RSS reading app to graze stories from the feeds I am following. After scrolling through the list, I have a set of browser tabs open to read. After reading, usually I have several tabs (or perhaps a lot of tabs) for which I would like to save the links. Many times in the past, I have copied them to a “link dump” file. However, another approach is to use a linkblogging tool to capture the links.

My tool of choice in this situation is MyStatusTool (my live version is here). Here is a screenshot from my phone browser:

The area above the “post your update” button is the text area to enter a post. MyStatusTool uses the medium-editor toolbar to make it easy to add a link. The most difficult thing is to select the link text and get the medium-editor toolbar to appear (usually I double-tap the text). It is also best to only link to a single word (again, selecting several words as the link text can be difficult). The tool also creates a view of user posts, so you can review just your posts and not all of the content from subscribed feeds.

If anyone is interested in installing MyStatusTool, let me know! More information is available at The Feed Network.

Andy — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 16:53:49 +0000

Here is a demo version of MyStatusTool (one of the tools in The Feed Network tool catalog) – take a look and let me know if anyone is interested in setting up a demo!

Andy — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 16:47:11 +0000

Meanwhile, the tools of The Feed Network are there for people to set up their own social networks with real-time notification. If anyone needs help with setup, let me know!

Andy — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 23:39:16 +0000

It’s great that someone wants to build an open social web on WordPress, but there is already an open social web that uses WordPress – The Feed Network!

Andy — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 23:33:57 +0000

It’s great that someone wants to build a social web network around RSS, but it already exists – The Feed Network!

Announcing – The Feed Network

Andy — Mon, 26 May 2025 19:33:40 +0000

In recent posts, I have been giving updates on my work to set up a feed-based social network using rssCloud as the notification protocol. The initial site to support this is now complete – The Feed Network at https://FeedNetwork.Social.

The site has a page on how to get started, a set of questions and answers, and a tool catalog listing the tools that support rssCloud. This is an effort to show that other technologies exist that can create the foundation of a social network.

For more info, go to The Feed Network, or check out our introductory video, or follow our blog feed for updates!