Feed Readers

There are 85 posts filed in Feed Readers (this is page 1 of 9).

Creating new types of feeds

I saw a post by Tantek Celik today describing how he created an h-feed microformat from a list of HTML elements. He then showed how this microformat could be read and parsed by the Monocle feed reader. He then pointed to a post by James Gallagher about how he publishes h-feed and uses the Granary tool to convert to RSS and other feed formats.

This is an interesting topic. I have looked at microformats before, to me it seems to be a way of adding to HTML to make it machine-readable without the construction of a separate feed. I have nothing against innovation in feeds, but I am not sure how popular the use of microformats is within the feed reader ecosystem.

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

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!

Thoughts on the “Winer WordPress Tease”

Dave Winer has been promoting his editor for WordPress sites, called WordLand, leading up to his keynote speech at WordCamp Canada in October 2025, as well as hinting about other WordPress-related projects. Recently, he asked readers to “Think Different About WordPress“, where he talks about how WordPress supports editing features that Mastodon and Bluesky do not support (linking, no character limits, and other features). WordPress also has “excellent support” for RSS and rssCloud, and has a “deep and powerful API“.

Dave Winer goes on to say that he is providing three things to bootstrap a development community around WordPress: (1) Apps (I assume this refers to WordLand), (2) a storage service (I assume this refers to his wpIdentity NPM package, which he uses for identity for his FeedLand feed reader, and also to provide storage for user writing (although it appears to use the MySQL database associated with a WordPress install)), and (3) content (to me, this is RSS from other sites, implying some feed reader app or link to a feed reader app (like FeedLand)).

Now, how does a development community arise from this? Well, I guess that if people want to use an API to interact with WordPress (create posts, manipulate data in the WordPress database), they can do that, and maybe wpIdentity makes it easier to create Node.js apps that can interact with WordPress (like WordLand). As Dave Winer has mentioned before, though, the WordPress API has been around for a long time, but does not seem to have gotten much use. I am not sure if providing an easier “front end” to an API will increase use of that API. The WordLand app up to this point has been “the example app”, but has been provided as a service (no source code), so it is more of a “working example” for developers, not an app that some one can build on. Finally, Dave Winer has been hinting about an “RSS timeline viewer“, which is perhaps where FeedLand comes in. Again, without the full picture, it is hard to see how these three things are going to spark a growth in WordPress application development.

Finally, Dave Winer posted a podcast on “the last chance for the open web“, in which he talks about WordLand as “really easy way to write for the open web that does not otherwise exist today”, among other topics. I do not see this as the “last chance” for anything. I have written before on the economics of software development and on innovation in RSS and podcasting. The open web is still there, still providing a platform for innovative work. Nobody stopped me from creating MyStatusTool as a Twitter replacement based on rssCloud, and nobody stopped me from collecting rssCloud-based tools at The Feed Network. I know that Dave Winer would like his writing tools to be able to push their content to all social media platforms. Maybe that is the “promised land” that WordPress might provide via the ActivityPub plugin and an AT Protocol plugin (not yet developed). We will have to wait and see…

Again, Dave Winer says that he is “building around WordPress to create a social network based on RSS”. To date, his teases indicate he is building only a “feed reader” experience. To me, social networks imply being able to communicate with others. Where’s the beef? Show it to us!

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.

Use case: linkblogging from your phone

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.

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.