HN user
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Good work! Both the explainer and the implementation! I'm using indiekit which basically comes with IndieWeb batteries included! https://rmendes.net and I'm working to get it implemented on https://textcaster.app
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
I'm working on improving my Indiekit https://getindiekit.com (not mine, just a big fan & heavy user, to which I created plugins : https://rmendes.net/changelog/ and also working on a local Ai-stack deployment so that I can put that DGX Spark for a good use !
Nice work, It would be really cool to be able to subscribe to a JSON/RSS/ATOM feed of this dashboard !
I would be interested, would even help testing and contribute but the next problem that arise if users had such easy way to deploy apps is, how do you handle backups, migration to new versions, single sign on, there are projects similar to this idea that already go very far, such as https://cloudron.io but they are "limited" in the amounts of apps they can provide with support and quality path for upgrades.
Inevitably, if I had all the apps I want to spin at hands, I would need a very neat way to make sure path to upgrades are smooth, don't break things already in place and potentially used in "production" by either friends of family..
it's a cool thing, but make it one time subscription, self-hosted, Docker, k8s, whatever else.. even a binary and I would pay for it, at least once. but I'm never going to deploy my blog on your stuff, that's for sure. also.. have you considered adding a few bricks of the indieweb.org / indiewebify etc..?
perhaps, backups, even encrypted, hosted at Apple or Google doesn't fit the values of Signal and many if not most of their users?
I'm into byobu because it allows me to choose tmux or screen and I've gotten used to how it handles new "windows" in my terminal, I mostly use it server side, so I can have persistence and have each tab window in the remote terminal running exactly what I want, combined with fish shell it's just a pleasure to work
Waiting for the self-hosted version... would be great to be able to deploy this with Kubernetes too
Simply the best VPN around, in terms of values, mindset, loyalty to their core beliefs and the relentless proof to stick to their moto over the last decades.
well... you just gave me a reason to rebuild my Bluesky extension from scratch, without a dependency from the original extension I used to get my base opengraph running. Bluesky OGraph Poster
I have been playing with it for a while but I miss a conversational interface where I can interrogate the PDF's and summarize them or let's say, find all the main events per year in a corpus of text and build a time-line of said events (context legal case with tons of text data to parse)
Properly Evil.
I want to do this but for 30GB of PDFs
Breaking : Also works with bridges, train tracks , roads and most old infrastructures
Feels like Spotify is restructuring systemic issues instead of trying to solve them. It's almost amazing how little, since the advent of Internet, the music industry changed, it did change, for established names more than small artist but the fundamental issue remains the same : fair & stable redistribution of value generated from artists.
Felicitas is one of those devs, every repository on her profile is a gem to learn from, and well documented!
wondering how the https://indieweb.org movement and their microformat approach to profiles and the use of RSS feeds isn't already an expression of this idea, only missing bit is the ability to quickly pull a blog contact into one's phone?
Does it also import folders when importing from a OPML file?
should OSS users of Vaultwarden be worried?
Mollie - https://www.mollie.com/
Issues with microphone on the FP4 that are not explainable but the good news is? I can just change the mic for 20 euro!
The real issue with the FP4 is the camera. Ugly pictures, and under bad lightning its like taking picture on android a decade ago.. Albeit the pixel number is enough.
Is This live? Will it update accordingly when new posts are made? Also it would be cool to share the OPML list of all these feeds..
the UI issue is being solved, both natively for/by mastodon itself, but most important, there is ELK which kind of put the whole UI of mastodon is not good several leaps forward.
What needs to change in terms of UI now is how any client interact with remote servers or how you can interact in your browser with the handle of someone else on his blog or any places that say "follow me on mastoodn", but really think that https://ELK.zone does a great job at improving mastodon UI already.
try https://elk.zone with your exisitng mastodon account, which is precisely that.
We should all have blogs and reboot "Web rings" mines run on https://micro.blog I dabble about things I find interesting, call it a link blog if you must!
I'm a big fan of FreshRSS (self-hosted) and if I need more powerful feature (such as filtering, dedup, webhooks) I use Inoreader, I have been using at least one rss reader since 2003 and there is no way silo's such as Twitter or others can do better than carefully curating ones own information feed.
The best. Using it for years.
I'm wondering how good Jellyfin is for music, mp3, flac, wav files..
There is also brutalinks https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/