Show HN: Textcaster, a feeds-native social timeline you can self-host
textcaster.appTextcaster is a feeds-native social timeline: people who post here and people who post on their own site are equal citizens. Everything travels as RSS — posts, replies, whole conversations — so following, threading, and federation work with nothing but open feeds. Hi HN, I'm Ricardo, the author. 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