Scripting News: Introducing rss.chat
SCRIPTING NEWS
It's even worse than it appears..
Friday July 10, 2026; 12:11 PM EDT<br>Introducing rss.chat#
Yesterday I asked if RSS can be a social network. #
The answer is yes, of course and -- here's rss.chat! #
The site is read-only except for a few of my programming buddies who are helping me figure out how to work in this environment.#
I started this project in April, a Dave/Claude creation. I could not have done something so complex internally, yet so simple to use and build on without Claude Code. The APIs on this thing are a product in their own right. #
We don't need anything more than RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSocket. All very established in the web world, and remarkably only one was developed by a standards body. #
We support textcasting, or text as defined by the web. Bringing the philosophy of podcasting to text. It's important that we get together on what text is. #
We're starting a bootstrap here, as of today. #
How is this RSS? #
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. #
The "whole community" feed has been in my blogroll for a month. #
We support rssCloud for instant updates. We were going to support WebSub until it became clear that we had to put an ad for Atom at the top of our RSS 2.0 feed. That bit of larceny has to be undone imho. I want to support a standard that other developers support, but to force something like that is incredibly anti-interop and as I said I believe the web and interop are the same thing. #
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. #
I don't care if rss.chat is a coral reef, what I want is a network of services that interop perfectly. I don't care whether you share your code or don't. Things are changing very quickly now, Claude and I wrote this together, but I am also teaching Claude how to clone this. So it'll be possible for a user, in vibe-coding mode, to change anything about the user interface, but you have to stick with the back-end formats and protocols to be part of the club. #
RSS devs #
If you're a developer, this is where you go next.#
The source namespace docs, to read about a couple of new elements, source:inReplyTo and source:comments.#
A full page of docs on RSS as a social network, explains how the pieces fit together.#
A GitHub thread where you can ask questions. #
Stay tuned #
We're just getting started. This is Day 0 in a story that could last a while and spread out pretty far. #
Working with Claude we have a plan for docs for all the APIs and protocols. There are quite a few of those. #
And we're going beyond Open Source, if you can believe that. AI has opened some new doors, I can't wait to build on those.#
And as with blogging and podcasting, started 20+ years ago, we're going to follow what people do with this. RSS will fade into the background and do its work quietly. Its job is to give users choice. #
Remember, every part is replaceable. If one is not, it's not part of the web.. #
PS: A Day 0 screen shot.#
© copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer.
Last update: Friday July 10, 2026; 12:38 PM EDT.
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