I’ve been following the development of rss.chat on Dave Winer’s Scripting.com for a while. Dave set up a limited example at chat.rss and now an open one at https://demo.rss.chat which I joined. There dosen’t seem to be a promise that this particular server will stay up, but it offers the chance to try and explore.
rss.chat is a social network:
- Every user has an RSS feed with all their posts.
- The whole community has an RSS feed.
- There is an OPML file that lists all the users.
You can subscribe to those feeds if you want.
Introducing rss.chat – daveverse
from the same page:
I envision a world of small communities, running on small servers. We haven’t released the code for this yet, but will, under an MIT license.
Which is interesting. I remember, when I started using micro.blog, one of my thoughts was that it was the perfect model for a small community with particular interests. At the time I was thinking of education. I love everything about micro.blog but I do not see many there with my interests in education. As I understand it, Dave has no intention in supporting all of micro.blog’s features. In fact I think he hopes that other people will used the spec and concept to create different things:
Don’t think of this as a product Rob. Think about features you want in other people’s products. Think of this as a source of feeds, not a destination for them.
https://demo.rss.chat/?id=108
This is a very interesting way to think about a new piece of software. There are also some interesting ideas on the github issues including mentions of webmentions and WordPress.
We released it as soon as we were ready to show it to developers. I want the web to be my social network, not companies trying to build their own web and saying it’s the web. It’s not a product, it’s an attempt to do on the web what should always have been on the web.
I figured you could make a social network out of components that already exist on the web and so far that seems to be true.
And we’ve added features to RSS, through the source name space that help it do the kinds of things that social networks do.