Show HN: Textcaster, a feeds-native social timeline you can self-host

by rmdes • 5 days ago

2 1 5 days ago

Textcaster is a feeds-native social timeline: people who post here and people who post on their own site are equal citizens. Everything travels as RSS — posts, replies, whole conversations — so following, threading, and federation work with nothing but open feeds.

rmdes• 5 days ago

Hi HN, I'm Ricardo, the author.

Textcaster is a social timeline built natively on feeds. The idea: posting through the instance and bringing your own site's RSS feed should land in the same timeline as equal citizens — following, threading, and federation all happen over open feeds (RSS, OPML, JSON Feed, WebSub, rssCloud) instead of a proprietary API. It's a modern take on Dave Winer's rss.chat and the Textcasting idea (textcasting.org); the name is an attribution/credit to Dave Winer.

What itched: the RSS/Textcasting world and the IndieWeb world have kept their distance, and social timelines are almost always locked behind a private API. I wanted to see if you could build a real, real-time, multi-user timeline where the substrate is just feeds — and where a conversation can federate A→B→A over nothing but RSS.

What works today (it's pre-release but end-to-end): - One live server-rendered timeline over SSE that mixes local posts and polled-in remote feeds. Works fully with JavaScript off — live updates are progressive enhancement, not a requirement. - Markdown composer with live preview; the same unified/remark pipeline renders the preview and the published post, sanitized server-side. - Real threading over plain RSS: replies are posts, reconstructed from the `source:` namespace + RFC 4685, with honest orphaning and out-of-order healing (a reply that arrives before its parent snaps into place later). - Feeds in (RSS/Atom/JSON Feed/OPML, plus h-feed/mf2), feeds out (per-user RSS+JSON and an all-users firehose), real-time federation both directions via WebSub + rssCloud. It round-trips with Dave Winer's rss.chat — his threadwalker walks Textcaster conversations unmodified. - Guest posting, email+password with verification, or passwordless magic link. One-command Docker dev stack; self-hostable behind Caddy with automatic HTTPS.

What's not there yet: IndieAuth sign-in, Micropub posting-in, and Webmention are next on the roadmap but unbuilt. No release is cut. Expect rough edges.

Stack: SvelteKit (Svelte 5) + Hono + SQLite, standards-forward with few dependencies and no framework lock-in. MIT, self-hostable.

I'd love feedback — especially from the RSS/Textcasting and IndieWeb folks, since interop is the whole point. If your site has a feed, I'm curious whether Textcaster threads it correctly. Code: https://github.com/rmdes/textcaster

Show HN: Textcaster, a feeds-native social timeline you can self-host

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