It’s a lot simpler and faster to install new instance of rss.chat. You don’t have to create and host your own database, that’s now built into the server using SQLite. Full instructions on how to install. If you have questions or issues, we’ve started a thread on the repo. More about this to come.

Reminder: We have a server for anyone who wants to try RSS.chat.

RSS.chat — I don’t have enough places to fit all the ideas these days. But we have been digging and the pieces fit together pretty well.

There are three parts to the rss.chat ecosystem. Writing. Today’s rss.chat product is a group writing system, designed for a school department, a team of developers, a family, a magazine or group blog, or just as well, a single author. I don’t think it would work well with 1000 users, because it doesn’t implement the […]

Evening: Very productive day. We rolled through some UI stuff that had been on the list for a while. Set up for a big job tomorrow, server side. The worknotes for client and server apps.

Two methods for creating standards: bootstrap and boil the ocean.

John Johnston got inboundRss working, so now he can automatically post to his blog from demo.rss.chat. These are the kinds of things that “just work” when standards are used to connect to the outside world. WordPress, as I’ve been saying so long, has all the right hooks to be the place where text and publishing […]

Yesterday was a wonderful first day for RSS.chat. It’s now out there, but we haven’t talked about or demo’d many of the things that it does. I wanted to get the feeds out there first, because now we get to think together about how they fit together to give us a social network experience. It’s […]

Claude codes. It may seem as if developers have taken over this blog, because we have real business to do. So much new stuff to show. Today’s RSS.chat goodie is an example app called ThreadWalker that crawls the network of replies under a single post, to all levels, printing them on screen in neat hierarchic […]

I wrote a pretty good set of paragraphs on Twitter/X this morning. Yesterday I announced RSS.chat. Some people spell it RSS.chat. I haven’t decided which way is right yet. The announcement covers a slice of the project, but it fans out to be the beginning of a bootstrap. I want to entice other projects to […]

Someone on Masto who I blocked used a nasty word to descript RSS.chat. Let me be really clear here, this is an act of authorship by me. Claude is helping, a lot — I doubt if I could have done this without its help, certainly not in the amount of time it has taken so […]

A karass is “a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.” I think of RSS.chat as a social network for my karass. A small group of people, not trying to get famous or rich from using a social network, rather wanted to work with or stay […]

RSS.chat is meant to be like MacWrite was on early Macs, give developers something to think about and lots of prior art for them to steal. All we want in return is interop. 😉

There’s a new Docs menu in RSS.chat. Right now it has pointers to the home page of our GitHub repo, and to the worknotes pages for the client and server. There will be lots more stuff in this menu as the project progresses.

Howard Rheingold is just the kind of person rss.chat was designed it for. And here he is asking what it is. Very fortuitous. And if you’re wondering how a person should think of it in July 2026, it’s for you too. 😉

I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat, and asked a few times, “what is this and how do I use it,” paraphrased. This was written by Claude in the third person, at my request. rss.chat is a small social network built from the web’s own parts. […]

Today on rss.chat we are knocking off quick hit bug fixes. We’ve been focusing on big hit examples for the last few sessions.

Today we have our first example app for WordPress. We started with an app I wrote that keeps scripting.com in sync with daveverse.org, which is a WordPress site.

Way back in March as I was starting to work with Claude Code, I think — we put together a pretty nice outliner that is remarkably feature-rich. I barely remember doing this. It’s what got me moving in this direction, and next month we started doing what became rss.chat.

I wonder if it makes sense to try to implement standard.site in the context of rss.chat?

Just finished The Expanse for the third time. Realized that the inners of today are Silicon Valley and the Belters, that’s the web.

I just listened to the second episode of a podcast about General Magic. It was an interview with the great Scott Knaster, who worked at Apple, Microsoft, Google, in addition to General Magic.

An experiment, RSS rendered in JSON.

Wrote this in 2018: “I know this is like pissing in the wind, but here’s an idea for a demonstration that might impress the Repubs in Congress. In every one of their home districts, people march to their polling place, next Saturday or the Saturday after that. Carrying signs that say We Know How To […]

We have a firehose in rss.chat. Instant updates from the server. No polling. Docs and examples.

In this project I think of Claude as a full contributor. Pronouns it/its. It’s both an very fast, capable developer, and a machine. I will refer to it as if it were a valued contributor, nothing less. We have a division of labor. Docs and examples come exclusively from Claude unless otherwise stated. I write […]

Our feeds can work with any feed reader. Examples, the feed of all posts on rss.chat, and a feed containing just mine. We just made a change in the feeds. There will be loose-ends like this. Still diggin! 😉

New rss.chat feature: It now supports feed discovery, so you can subscribe to any html page on the site in a compatible feed reader. I tested it in FeedLand and NetNewsWire and it works. Works on any instance, not just ours.

I mentioned the previous post on rss.chat, and it developed into an interesting thread, something that I’ve never had the option to discuss. AT Proto makes a similar offer to developers that we do. The difference is our world is wide open, it’s just already burned-in web protocols, and imho their structure, based on an […]

In my experience it’s good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That’s the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol behind it, ActivityPub. If you go all the way to the end […]