Open letter to Dave Winer’s call to develop feed-based social media apps

On December 3, Dave Winer published a “call to develop” for a feed-based social media app (he mentioned Mastodon in his post, but could be any social media app out there in my opinion). Sounds great to me! I have a feed-based app using rssCloud for notification called MyStatusTool (link to Github repo and my install). It is implemented using Node.js, Express, and Embedded Javascript for templating. It inspired Colin Walker to develop a PHP implementation of the tool (Github repo, his install). We were able to use our tools to interop with each other (have a real-time conversation), and to follow other feeds using rssCloud for notification. I have tested my implementation with the rssCloud user feeds from FeedLand and WordPress.com in addition to Colin Walker’s MyStatusTool implementation, and verified the real-time performance (new posts showed up almost immediately).

Now, is MyStatusTool a fully-developed thing? Nope! It’s a bootstrap. It does use a number of Node packages developed by Dave Winer for feed generation and feed reading, and uses Andrew Shell’s rssCloud server for notification, so I think it falls into the “working together” category that Dave Winer wrote about in 2015: “When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else’s work, use it.”

I am ready to work for interop with whatever Dave develops. I don’t have any illusion that MyStatusTool is the epiphany of feed-based social media tools, but I developed it to see if one could be developed, and it spawned another implementation, so I think that is pretty cool. Let’s get busy and see what happens!

This morning I remembered that I used to read a feed of photos from Flickr for a river of news site I created. I found that feed and added it to my River5 install, generated a river file, and created a photocasting site with the flow of photos from Flickr, using the same code from my artcasting site – excellent!

Followup on artcasting test – I did not see anything appear on the admin page of my MyStatusTool install. Checked to see that I could read one of the BlueSky art feeds using reallySimple, that worked. Looked at the myItems.json file from my server, did not see any items there, so I am wondering if the rssCloud part of the BlueSky art feeds is working. Will continue to investigate…