demo here https://rsc.rmdes.be
112 karma · joined August 25, 2018
demo here https://rsc.rmdes.be
It's even more the case with English or any non-native language
Textcaster is a social timeline built natively on feeds. The idea: posting through the instance and bringing your own site's RSS feed should land in the same timeline as equal citizens — following, threading, and federation all happen over open feeds (RSS, OPML, JSON Feed, WebSub, rssCloud) instead of a proprietary API. It's a modern take on Dave Winer's rss.chat and the Textcasting idea (textcasting.org); the name is an attribution/credit to Dave Winer.
What itched: the RSS/Textcasting world and the IndieWeb world have kept their distance, and social timelines are almost always locked behind a private API. I wanted to see if you could build a real, real-time, multi-user timeline where the substrate is just feeds — and where a conversation can federate A→B→A over nothing but RSS.
What works today (it's pre-release but end-to-end): - One live server-rendered timeline over SSE that mixes local posts and polled-in remote feeds. Works fully with JavaScript off — live updates are progressive enhancement, not a requirement. - Markdown composer with live preview; the same unified/remark pipeline renders the preview and the published post, sanitized server-side. - Real threading over plain RSS: replies are posts, reconstructed from the `source:` namespace + RFC 4685, with honest orphaning and out-of-order healing (a reply that arrives before its parent snaps into place later). - Feeds in (RSS/Atom/JSON Feed/OPML, plus h-feed/mf2), feeds out (per-user RSS+JSON and an all-users firehose), real-time federation both directions via WebSub + rssCloud. It round-trips with Dave Winer's rss.chat — his threadwalker walks Textcaster conversations unmodified. - Guest posting, email+password with verification, or passwordless magic link. One-command Docker dev stack; self-hostable behind Caddy with automatic HTTPS.
What's not there yet: IndieAuth sign-in, Micropub posting-in, and Webmention are next on the roadmap but unbuilt. No release is cut. Expect rough edges.
Stack: SvelteKit (Svelte 5) + Hono + SQLite, standards-forward with few dependencies and no framework lock-in. MIT, self-hostable.
I'd love feedback — especially from the RSS/Textcasting and IndieWeb folks, since interop is the whole point. If your site has a feed, I'm curious whether Textcaster threads it correctly. Code: https://github.com/rmdes/textcaster
Inevitably, if I had all the apps I want to spin at hands, I would need a very neat way to make sure path to upgrades are smooth, don't break things already in place and potentially used in "production" by either friends of family..
The real issue with the FP4 is the camera. Ugly pictures, and under bad lightning its like taking picture on android a decade ago.. Albeit the pixel number is enough.
What needs to change in terms of UI now is how any client interact with remote servers or how you can interact in your browser with the handle of someone else on his blog or any places that say "follow me on mastoodn", but really think that https://ELK.zone does a great job at improving mastodon UI already.