Post.news Rss Generator
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:
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.