Syndicating conversation: bringing comments to RSS feeds

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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.

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blogs, RSS, self publishing, technology

Blogosphere: an algorithm free blog post aggregator

6 April 2026

The new (to me at least) aggregator of blog posts aptly and cleverly titled Blogosphere, is the creation of engineer and writer Ramkarthik Krishnamurthy:

But it’s really about something bigger: rebuilding a thriving community of independent writers and thinkers who share their thoughts freely, without waiting for an algorithm to decide who gets to see them.

A list of recent blog posts can also be viewed in a more simple text style format. In addition, both listings of posts have their own RSS feeds.

Blogosphere joins other fine IndieWeb/SmallWeb blog post aggregators including Blogs Are Back, Blogroll Club, Blogroll, Feedle, powRSS, Oceania Web Atlas, and ooh.directory, to name but a few.

Blogs are Back: easily follow website and blog RSS feeds with one-click

26 January 2026

Subscribing to RSS feeds is my preferred option for following websites, but for people unfamiliar with the really simple syndication system, doing so can be daunting.

I’ve long thought subscribing to a website needs to be as easy as following someone on a social network. Tap the follow button to follow, and you’re following.

But following a RSS feed — doubtless something anyone reading this post could do in their sleep — isn’t necessarily straightforward. People first require a suitable RSS reader, again, something that’s easy when you know how. Then they need to go about the process of obtaining the URL of the RSS feed they wish to subscribe to.

But there’s more than one click involved in this process. While it’s easy as pie for some of us, I can see why many people decide not to bother, or simply stay on the socials instead.

Blogs are Back, created by Travis Van Nimwegen, an American software engineer, might be a solution to the one-click subscribe conundrum. Blogs are Back is two things: a directory of personal websites and blogs, and a simple way of following the RSS feeds of listed blogs.

Click the follow button of a website of your choosing, and that’s it.

Posts from any website a Blogs are Back user subscribes to will be visible in the integrated RSS reader. There’s also an option to submit a blog if it’s not already in the directory, and the more websites present, the better.

I’m not sure if an ubiquitous app/website, allowing people who know nothing at all about RSS, to follow RSS feeds with ease, will emerge — it seems to me RSS is mostly for those publishing their own RSS feeds — but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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blogs, RSS, technology, trends

Read a chapter of a book daily in your RSS reader

17 November 2025

Made by Las Vegas based software developer Pablo Enoc, who’s also behind indie RSS aggregator powRSS, lettrss will send a chapter of the book you’re reading to your RSS reader each day.

Here’s an idea with merit.

Reading novels is just about the last thing I get to each evening, and I don’t usually cover much ground before falling asleep. If a chapter of whatever I was reading appeared in my RSS feed though, I might make more progress since I read a lot of what takes my interest there. This idea might get a few more of us reading more regularly, since a chapter at a time usually isn’t too onerous.

At the moment only books in the public domain (or those out of copyright) can be read with lettrss. But this idea has possibilities. Imagine if book publishers were to make recent titles available this way, through possibly a subscription model of some sort.

Subscribe Openly, and (almost) one-click RSS feed subscriptions

23 September 2025

In an ideal world subscribing to a website/blog’s RSS feed should be as simple as following a page on the socials. Simply click the follow button, and that’s it. In the case of, say, Instagram all future posts of whoever you started following will be visible — algorithms permitting — in the main/home feed.

Of course, subscribing to a RSS feed isn’t difficult. If you know what you’re doing. But to those to don’t know much about RSS, clicking the subscribe button might result in confusion and frustration, and see them abandoning the process all together.

Sometimes clicking the subscribe button might only open the URL of the RSS feed, leaving a budding subscriber wondering what to do next. “Am I meant to bookmark this link?” they might wonder.

But before we ask people to subscribe to a RSS feed, we need them to understand they first need a RSS reader. A RSS reader is an app that allows people to subscribe to, and read, RSS feeds. But to the uninitiated, the process of installing a RSS reader might present another confusing hurdle, only further complicating matters.

Subscribe Openly, however, created by James, is a step in the right direction.

Instead of presenting a would-be RSS subscriber with a screen filled with the raw data of a RSS feed, when they click on the subscribe button, they are presented with a list of RSS readers they can install. Here’s what you’d see if you were subscribing to the RSS feed for my website this way.

Next it needs to be made understood to prospective RSS subscribers that setting up a reader app is not that difficult. They doubtless have numerous apps on their device already, a RSS reader would simply be just another app they need to install. Let’s get to it.

Perhaps though styling feeds so they’re coherent in a web browser is something publishers who syndicate content to RSS should consider. Having a RSS feed that renders like a webpage — that could be bookmarked like any other website — does of course seem like it defeats the purpose of having a RSS feed.

But, if people new to RSS see a coherent looking webpage when clicking the URL of a RSS feed, they might have more incentive to find out more about RSS.

Bloggers might have been syndicating content with ICE not RSS

11 September 2025

Ryan Farley, writing at Buttondown:

Not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware that a war ever took place. Everyone was so fixated on the drama over RSS’s competing standards (Atom vs RSS 2.0) that they barely registered the rise and fall of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) specification, which had been created, funded, and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, Adobe, CNET, and other household names.

Here’s a slice of web history I was unaware of until now: an alternative blog content syndication specification that was — for a short time — in competition with RSS.

That Microsoft, as one of the backers of Information and Content Exchange (ICE) syndication, quietly began using RSS, says a lot. A lot about RSS, and Microsoft.

RSS is so awesome it made the front page of Hacker News

1 September 2025

Some Hacker News (HN) members were astonished that a relatively concise blog post, written by Evan Verma, spruiking the merits of RSS, reached the front page of the news aggregator recently.

There’s probably not too many people on HN who don’t use RSS, but more generally, uptake is not particularly high. On that basis, any publicity is helpful. Let’s keep encouraging the adoption of RSS.

What is RSS? Read all about it here.

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blogs, RSS, technology, trends

RSS as a W3C standard? Now there’s an idea

28 January 2025

If the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can adopt ActivityPub as a recommendation, something they did eight years ago, you have to wonder why they didn’t do the same for RSS.

Dave Winer:

The W3C should’ve gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They’re controlled by big companies who are truly scared of interop, explains why most of their proposed standards go nowhere.

One of the functions of web standards, published by the W3C, is interoperability:

W3C web standards are optimized for interoperability, security, privacy, web accessibility, and internationalization.

Interoperability, however, is also a tenet of the ActivityPub recommendation:

W3C’s role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.

We can have the ActivtyPub protocol, which has interoperability at it’s core, but not RSS, which is the same.

RSS is really simple, why do so many find it complicated?

17 May 2024

Chris, writing at uncountable thoughts:

RSS is a pervasive, but little known, web technology that allows you aggregate all your content into one place for easy reading. There are very few websites without an RSS feed, although many don’t advertise the link (or, even realise they have it).

When you put an RSS feed link into your RSS, it is called “subscribing”. But don’t worry — it’s totally free, and you don’t give your email address.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is really simple. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, and anyone who has ever syndicated their web content, has always struggled to convince their readers of that. Like, probably since RSS arrived in March 1999. Yet RSS almost had its moment, during the so-called golden age of blogging, circa 2003 to 2010.

Writers took to writing blogs, and readers took to reading blogs. Content Management Systems like WordPress churned out RSS feeds automatically. All a blogger had do was prominently post a link to their RSS feed. Really simple. Writing posts explaining what RSS was, and why it was useful, was also common. Erstwhile (by the looks of it) Australian blogger Meg Tsiamis, of (defunct) Top 100 Australian Blogs Index fame, wrote a post in 2007, outlining RSS to her mother, and other of her readers.

Sadly, the more in-depth resource she linked to, is no longer online. In other words though, we’ve been trying for years, decades, to impress upon others the simplicity and function of RSS, but too little, or no, avail. Unfortunately RSS plain simply baffled just about anyone, and everyone, who didn’t write a blog. RSS was too technical, too geeky, many people complained.

But popular perceptions of RSS were only one problem. Accessing RSS easily was another. Some argued Google closing down their popular RSS reader, er, Google Reader (which I never used), in 2013, sounded the death knell of RSS. But the real problem had always been one of uptake, or rather, lack of uptake. Geekiness aside, some people questioned the purpose of RSS in the first place.

I recall, in 2014, trying to explain the utility of RSS to a co-member of a small business coffee meeting group I was then part of. I pulled out my laptop at the cafe we gathered at one morning, and showed him my RSS reader of the time (NewsGator, I think). “Look, see, you only have to visit one website to read one hundred websites,” I said, as I scrolled through my subscription list.

He marvelled as he looked on, recognising a number of websites he visited regularly. “All you need do is get a RSS reader app, like the one we’re looking at now, subscribe to the RSS feeds you like, and you’re set,” I said. Despite my small presentation though, he still looked confused. He didn’t seem to understand why you’d stop visiting a website, to read its content elsewhere.

Oh, the frustration.

Today RSS is even simpler. No apps are needed, one only has to create an account through a RSS aggregator website, Feedly for example (free for a basic account), and start subscribing. You don’t even need to know the URL of a website’s RSS feed. Type in the regular URL, and Feedly will search for available feeds.

Subscribing to an RSS feed is really the same as following someone on Instagram (IG). And it’s just as simple. Choose an IG page you want to follow, and tap the follow button. With RSS though, instead of following, you’re subscribing, although some RSS aggregators call the process following.

Better still, and as is often reported elsewhere, your subscription is anonymous (you could follow my RSS feed, and I’d have no idea unless you told me), and you only see the content you want to. There are no algorithms, or annoying “suggested for you” content. How good is that?

Well, not good enough, perhaps. Until subscribing to a RSS feed literally becomes as easy as following someone on social media, selling RSS as a really simple way of following a website, will, unfortunately, remain a hard sell.

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blogs, RSS, technology, trends

2023 the year of the RSS reader for email newsletters?

27 December 2022

While I trawl Twitter, Instagram, and other aggregator sites for news and information, I still also use Really Simple Syndication (RSS)… yes, I hear the laughter. If I had my way though, I’d rely solely on RSS, where every channel I peruse could be pulled into a single, convenient, interface. Trust me, reading the whole internet is so much easier when you only have to look at the one screen.

RSS, which, by the way, is really simple once you get the hang of it, allows you to read the content of any website, or social media platform for that matter, offering a RSS feed. But not everyone saw RSS as simple, and consequentially the technology has been out of mainstream favour for some time now. RSS developers were also at loggerheads as to the direction the syndication technology should take, while publishers were uncertain as to how they could monetise content served via RSS.

I’m also subscribed to about half a dozen newsletters, but I struggle to keep up with the many and myriad newsletters presently in circulation. And still some people say we’ve not yet reached “peak newsletter”. Really? I reached peak newsletter at least ten years ago. Having said that, I have vague plans to publish a newsletter here, but I’m not sure I want to inflict yet another newsletter on the world, as there’s surely enough of them already.

Imagine though you could read all your email newsletters by way of a RSS app. But you wouldn’t be seeing a web version of a particular email newsletter, something a provider like Mailchimp makes available. Instead, an email newsletter RSS app would pull the content of all the newsletters from your email in-box, and funnel them into the email RSS app. You’d then see your email subscriptions displayed in the same way as the RSS feeds of any websites you subscribe to are.

An email newsletter RSS reader just might make browsing all those newsletters a little more manageable. And the idea’s not so far-fetched either, says Nikki Usher, writing for NiemanLab, who thinks such an app is possible, various technical issues notwithstanding:

I predict that these people won’t stand for a universe where their email becomes ever more crowded just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter. The only way to survive in a world where multiple DC-insider publications are launching multiple newsletters and Twitter is no longer socially acceptable is to use an RSS reader that satisfies the intelligentsia and political elite.

Will we get it? It may well be that the feed from email to robust RSS reader needs an API that isn’t yet possible, given password-protected, your-and-Gmail’s-eyes-only email. RSS readers may need their own ecology of analytics in order to be commercially desirable and worthy of tech investment.

Might then 2023 be the year of RSS? Even if it is for email newsletters? It seems like a big call, but I’m watching this space. Might the current malaise towards the today’s centralised internet see RSS return to favour? Again, a big call, but who knows.

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