Post.news Rss Generator
Christopher De Vries
January 9, 2023
As twitter continues its tumultuous path under Musk's
leadership, many people have been moving to federated social networks such as
mastodon or other ActivityPub federated sites. Like
the web itself, this allows users on different servers to interact and is a system
which no one person owns. I think this is a great development, and I am hoping
this brings about a renaissance in non-corporate
internet servers (or the small web as
Aral Balkan calls it).
Unfortunately the entry barrier has stopped several people who want to move away
from twitter from moving to a federated social network. I hope eventually these
barriers are removed, but in the mean time another walled garden has emerged in
the Andreessen-Horowitz funded post.news site. This website
is a model of anti-patterns. It is impossible to follow links within the site
without signing up. It does not provide RSS feeds or a public API. It does not
federate using any existing protocols.
I wrote postnewsrss to help alleviate
this issue. Given a user's root post.news page, for example https://post.news/@lulu
is Lulu Garcia-Navarro's page, you can create an RSS feed that you can bookmark
and add to your RSS reader. No more annoying navigation, and no need to create
a new account in another corporate walled garden. Some sample RSS feeds are:
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Neil Gaiman
Peter Sagal
John Cusak
The service is still under active development, and there are some rough edges,
for example blockquotes and lists need some work, but it works reasonably well
already. Hopefully this service will eventually go away as people flock to more open
social networks built to integrate with other servers in the same way the web
does today.
Discussion in the ATmosphere