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.