RSS Expert

Well, I didn’t know whether something like this already existed. But a while ago, I had an idea: what if I could use RSS feeds to communicate? Everyone knows RSS feeds are one of the basic ways we stay updated, get notifications, and keep ideas moving. So I don’t think I need to explain what they are here.

But I do want to make a few observations. I still remember the first time I heard about RSS: it was around the same time I joined Reddit, on the day Aaron Swartz died. I remember seeing the news, although I hadn’t yet looked very deeply into his work.

People were mistakenly saying that Aaron was the creator of Reddit, and that was what drew me there, even though it’s well known that Huffman and Ohanian were its founders. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that he was one of Reddit’s earliest developers and is often treated as a co-founder. It’s also worth noting that he wasn’t involved in the project’s original idea or conception.

In any case, I started reading about Swartz and found someone with very clear goals and a concrete vision of an open, free internet. Among the works he co-authored, one in particular caught my attention: RSS, specifically RSS 1.0, whose working group he joined when he was still very young. And from that moment, tied to the life and death of Aaron Swartz, my small obsession with RSS feeds began.

In a way, almost everything around social networks follows principles that RSS feeds had already established: scrolling, getting notified, receiving updates in real time. Think about it: Facebook and Instagram are, in some sense, megalomaniacal RSS feeds. Someone updates a status; you, through the app, have the aggregator; then you see it and interact with it—just on a much larger scale.

As I’ve said before in other posts, the fediverse and the pubs became objects of fascination for me in mid-2025, when I spent most of my free time studying this whole development—its nuances, interpretations, and connections. In fact, it’s still a fascination of mine, and it remains incredibly captivating: decentralization as a form of expression.

One night a few months ago, while I was drinking coffee in the lab, a question came to me: what if I ran an experiment to make RSS more communicative?

I didn’t want this experiment to become just one more thing among the hundreds of RSS-related projects sitting in my GitHub. I wanted something relevant. Something more solid.

So I started researching, and after several analyses, studies, completely failed implementations, and plans that were far too abstract, something finally took shape in my head:

“I’m going to build a feed reader and publisher that lets people talk, with the conversation happening through RSS.”

Then I imagined three things that would normally require three different programs:

1 – Reading what other people have written (a feed reader)

2 – Writing and being read by the people who follow me (a blog)

3 – Replying to someone and having that reply reach them (a social network)

 From that point on, I knew what I had to do: bring the three together. I set out to build a system that could do all three things in the same format: static XML served over HTTP.

No API would be needed to take part. If a site published an <item> with a <source:inReplyTo> pointing to one of its posts, that would count as a reply, no matter what software was being used.

 And why does that matter?

In a conventional social network, your account belongs to the company. Here, your identity is your domain: you prove that yourwebsite.com is yours, and that’s what appears next to your name. If you leave this instance someday, you take your domain and your readers with you. They follow a feed URL, not a profile.

Well, I won’t drag this out too much. This is just a glimpse of what I’ve been working on. For now, I think that’s enough...