rss chat

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.