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RSC

A social timeline built natively on feeds.

RSC — Really Simple Conversations — is a social timeline built natively on open feeds. People who post through the instance and people who post from their own website's feed are equal citizens of the same live timeline, and following, replies, and whole conversations travel as plain RSS instead of a proprietary API.

Pre-release, but deep — real end to end today, no release cut yet.

Why it exists

Social platforms lock your posts, your graph, and your conversations inside an API only they control. Open feeds have carried writing across the web for two decades — but they were treated as a read-only broadcast channel, never as the place a conversation actually lives.

RSC's bet is that a conversation can travel over nothing but RSS. A reply is a post; a thread is reconstructed from feeds; a conversation can federate from one instance to another and back again with no extra protocol. If it works over feeds, no single service owns it — and anyone who already publishes a feed is already halfway in.

What it is

  • One live timeline. Local posts and polled-in remote feed items share a single server-rendered timeline that updates live. It works with JavaScript off — the live updates are an enhancement, not a requirement.
  • Rich posting. A Markdown composer with live preview, tables, emoji shortcodes, and syntax-highlighted code. What you preview is what readers get, and every post is sanitized before it reaches a browser.
  • Real conversations over plain RSS. Replies thread inline and on a dedicated conversation page, reconstructed from feeds — with honest orphaning when a parent is missing and healing when a reply arrives before its parent.
  • Feeds in. Subscribe to any RSS, Atom, or JSON Feed, import an OPML blogroll, or point at a plain web page and let discovery find its feed. Every outbound fetch is guarded against SSRF.
  • Feeds out, live. Each user gets an RSS and JSON feed, and the instance publishes an all-users firehose. New posts are pushed to subscribers in real time over WebSub and rssCloud — so federation is live, not just polled.
  • Interop with rss.chat. RSC round-trips rss.chat: a conversation can federate A→B→A over plain RSS, and our feeds are walkable by its thread walker unchanged.
  • Accounts. Browse and post as a guest first, then upgrade to a verified email account or sign in with a magic link.
  • Self-hosting. A one-command Docker dev stack, and a production stack that runs behind Caddy with automatic HTTPS.

Next, not yet built: IndieAuth sign-in and Micropub posting-in, Webmention, and optional ActivityPub reach into the fediverse.

How it works

Under the hood there are two parts: a headless core service that owns the feeds, federation, threading, and the timeline, and a web app that is the only thing your browser talks to. The core speaks open standards the rest of the web already understands — RSS, OPML, JSON Feed, WebSub, and rssCloud — so it federates with other sites and instances directly, without anyone adopting an RSC-specific protocol.

The page you're reading, and every post, is rendered and sanitized through a single trusted path on the server before it ever reaches a browser. Nothing else is a browser-facing surface.

Who built it — and on whose shoulders

RSC is built by Ricardo (rmdes). It stands on ideas and standards it did not invent:

  • Dave Winer & textcasting.org — the Textcasting manifesto, RSS, OPML, rssCloud, and rss.chat, whose conversations RSC interops with.
  • The IndieWeb community — Micropub, Webmention, IndieAuth, and microformats2.
  • JSON Feed — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons.
  • WebSub and the broader open-feed ecosystem.

It's open source under the MIT license and made to be self-hosted. The source, the README, and the founding design are all public.