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RSS/Atom Output

Having an RSS feed associated with pages would be a fantastic way to open up the content. Similar arguments could also be made for ActivityPub integration, but that's a much larger lift. I remain a huge RSS user, and it's a nice standard way to reshare content without being tied to a platform.

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I hacked together an RSS feed service for Cohost in July, then stopped development when I heard there was an official one.


But it's still live at https://eggbug.news/

If you want a slightly different take on Cohost RSS that supports CWs and tags and the like, check out https://corobel.nora.codes/username/feed.rss (or https://corobel.nora.codes/username/originals.rss for just original posts)

@Xoey, the format is this:

https://username.cohost.org/rss/public

I also love how the example user for this talked about RSS in their first post lol.

I thought cohost RSS support hasn't been implemented at all. How have you got anything appearing in your RSS reader?

Hi team! Thank you for your new social media service, it's looking great so far. I would like to consume my following (or sometimes individual users without following) through an RSS reader. So the bare bones setup is great so far, in terms of notifying when a new post is made. I do note that at this current stage: Shared posts do not render at all in the rss item. Not sure if text will be rendered if a user has included additional text along with the shared post (equivalent to a quote tweet). Posts with media (video & css TBD) does not render, but the text renders fine. I'll be interested as to how CSS styled posts will be rendered in an RSS format, since most rss readers don't support custom styles. Maybe converting css animations to a video file or omitting them entirely? It'd be worth implementing a "simplified" / "stripped" version of the post to preserve some text formats, eg using double
's to clearly seperate a shared post with the user's additional post, and converting stylised text to bold, italicised, etc - no support for color, unfortunately. If there are complex CSS posts, maybe a humanised version of the css style before the text to provide context on how the content is presented? For example: [justified aligned, floated to left, transparent color (or hex / rgba?), with shadow] blurry text goes here. [Hidden, z-index 99] hidden text to be revealed as a suprise!

@shel - instinctively I agree, I was just wondering if you wanted to share any specific thoughts as to why. I'm not super deep into that space, so my opinions aren't terribly educated on the subject. It basically boils down to "distributed systems are hard and tend to make things way more complicated than less distributed systems, and social media needs to be *easy*."

@Remy Porter - Federated social media is bad IMHO. I don't want cohost blogs to be interoperable with Mastodon or for that to be expected.

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@shel - out of curiosity, why? I don't actually know much about ActivityPub. I'm gently curious about the idea of it, but skeptical of any distributed system like this (because they always become niche systems anyway).

I think we should do RSS and absolutely under no circumstances should do ActivityPub (and I used to work on the committee that helped make and implement ActivityPub my name is like on the W3 website for it)

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we're planning on doing RSS feeds!  (we've actually got an RSS feed generator already written, but the code is old and broken and needs to be redone.)

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I have seen two different people say that they aren't using cohost because it doesn't support RSS. I'm not one of those people, but I agree it would be nice.

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