Syndicating conversation: bringing comments to RSS feeds

28 September 2026

Vladimir Campos, posting on Masterdon last week:

Catching up on my RSS reader today, I came across really nice posts from @ellane [Ellane], @disassociated, and @dcbuchan [David Buchan], and had the same thought I’ve been having for so long: why isn’t there an easy way to reply to articles when using an RSS reader? rss.chat, created by @davew [Dave Winer], is the closest to that idea I have seen so far.

In the twenty-plus years I’ve been reading RSS feeds, I’ve never once given thought to the prospect of being able to directly comment on them. Mainly, I imagine, because it simply has not been possible. Is not RSS but a glorified push notification, after all?

Like everyone else, if I’ve wanted to respond to something I’ve seen on an RSS feed, I click through to the source website, and leave a comment if there’s an option to do so.

But the notion of commenting on a blog’s RSS feed isn’t all that far fetched. Many of us read blog and website content through RSS, but wouldn’t it be great if we could stay put, in our RSS reading apps, and comment on the posts we see from there?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is an initialism of Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a format that allows a website or blog to republish, or syndicate, its content to a separate channel. Someone reading a blog’s RSS feed (or channel) is able to see the blog’s content without the need to visit the website where the content was originally published.

The RSS feed for disassociated can be found at disassociated.com/feed/ but if you type that URL into the address bar of your browser, what you see may not make much sense. Subscribe to that feed in a RSS reader such as Feedly though, and everything will be far more coherent.

The beauty of subscribing to multiple, maybe hundreds or more, of websites by RSS, means the person reading all that content can stay in one place, their RSS reader, without needing to visit numerous blogs individually. Think of RSS as centralising the blog reading process.

Content pushes through to the RSS reader soon after a blog publishes a new post, in the same way for instance, a photo or video appears on the page of someone you follow on Instagram.

Interactive RSS feeds are possible

Dave Winer, who played a significant role in developing web syndication technologies such as RSS, thirty years ago, recently launched RSS.chat, a social network built on RSS, where participants can chat in real time. If RSS technology can power a social network, surely then it is possible to comment directly on RSS feed posts.

For this to happen though, there needs to be significant cooperation between the parties involved in publishing RSS content, and those facilitating the means with which to read same, says Winer:

There has to be cooperation between the products that generate the feed and the ones where you read the feed. And cooperation has never been the priority for the developers.

Developers of blog publishing applications generating RSS feeds will need to make provision for comments to be appended to existing RSS posts. Producers of RSS readers will to add an option that lets a subscriber write a comment, possibly a “reply to this post” button. And that’s just for starters.

Winer though says he is working on a system that achieves these requirements:

My approach is going to be to provide products that do both ends, and then, if it becomes popular, the others will compete.

RSS comments a boost for RSS, blogging?

I’m all for people who read my website via RSS being able to comment on posts from their RSS reader, even it there are still a few things to think about.

Moderation and spam filtering, among them, even though that sounds obvious. Many more issues are covered in this in-depth post by David Buchan. But there would be answers to most concerns that RSS commenting might raise.

I’m hopeful, along with Winer, that RSS commenting would catch on. Who knows, it might generate more interest in the syndication format, and even blogging, although that seems like a big ask with the way things are. But I look forward to finding out.