Feed Readers

There are 88 posts filed in Feed Readers (this is page 1 of 9).

Other examples of inbound/outbound RSS support

Dave Winer pointed to Ricardo Mendes from his linkblog on July 10 with the title “Inbound and Outbound RSS”. I took a look at the Mendes post, he describes using Indiekit and plugins to both read and write posts. I think this is very similar to my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool. In the Mendez setup, it sounds like he is also reading feeds that do not include rssCloud support.

Mendez also mentions work by Aaron Parecki on the Monacle social feed reader/writer. This tool used the Micropub and Microsub specs for publishing and subscribing. The above link is from 2016, so you can see that this predates both the MyStatusTool and rss.chat tools.

What are the attributes of a “social platform”?

On June 28, 2026, Dave Winer put out a call for social web app developers to work with him if they are including inbound and outbound RSS in their apps. Manton Reece from Micro.blog referenced this in a post on Micro.blog, and had this statement: “I’m actually not aware of any social platforms that support inbound RSS except Micro.blog. It would be great to have more.”. Dave Winer then responded on Micro.blog as follows (partial quote):

I want a world of social platforms that support inbound RSS

Those two posts caught my eye, specifically the word “platform”. Why did they choose the word “platform”? That made me wonder – is this really a call for “centralized” services like Bluesky/Mastodon to add inbound RSS (to allow users to post within these services as “first class citizens” (as if they were posting within official apps for Bluesky/Mastodon))? In earlier comments on this topic, I wrote:

I have addressed this second objection before, stating “What is in it for the “other people’s software developers to add inbound and outbound RSS support”? My answer is – nothing – no users are demanding this – no users are clamoring for a RSS-based “social network” that can communicate as a peer with other social network software.

I had developed a web app in 2023 called MyStatusTool, and this app allows users to follow RSS feeds that support rssCloud (inbound RSS) and allows the user to create their own posts with a feed (outbound RSS). However, I had not thought about the following/display of other RSS feeds as “inbound RSS” until now.

I created this app because back in 2022, Dave Winer kept talking about creating an app that could do this, but he did not actually do anything about it, so I decided to do it! The one feature this app does not have is support for replies/following threads, which “platforms” like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog support. Perhaps that is a key “attribute” of a “social platform”….

From recent posts, I am aware that Dave Winer is “working on something” with RSS and rssCloud to create some chat application. Hope he releases it soon! Hope it has inbound and outbound RSS!

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.