Inbound RSS for social media?
2024-12-13 14:09:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
In this multi polar social media world, where not only do we have Twitter, but also Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Truth Social, Nostr and countless others, wouldn’t it make sense to offer inbound RSS as a standard feature?
The way it might work:
- Platforms provide a way for users to set an RSS feed in their profile
- Anything that appears in the feed gets posted to the users social media account
- Crucially each platform implements a way to handle text, truncation, conversion to a multi post thread, images, video, support for basic HTML / markdown
That’s the basic idea but you could add lots of interesting features, like for example filters that use RSS categories, or prefix/postfix text etc.
This would enable existing independent writers and bloggers to join the network at no cost. And once they start seing engagement they will naturally start interacting with readers of their content.
It has the potential to be a huge competitive advantage against other social networks. And a great simple fallback in case everything is fucked, because those that use the feature will have a copy of their content. It would enable people to join many more networks than without such a feature.
There are auto-poster services available, but I’ve found them to be unreliable. Much better would be the platforms themselves to give their users the tools to import the content they are already writting out on the open web. Yes we will at some point have potentially better social media protocols like ActivityPub and AT protocol, but both can exist at the same time, by supporting RSS you will increase the size of your on-ramp considerably. #