Tuesday, July 14th, 2026

# Back in November 2023, Dave Winer wrote: "I have an itch to make a simple chat program for a workgroup whose only output is a simple RSS 2.0 feed." If that sounds familiar, I mentioned it in the context of the MyStatusTool (MST) created by Andy Sylvester, of which I made a test PHP version. Dave is now scratching that itch by building (and testing) rss.chat: We don't need anything more than RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSocket. All very established in the web world, and remarkably only one was developed by a standards body. Every user has an RSS feed, as does the whole community, and an OPML file lists everyone using it. Obviously, any RSS reader can subscribe to any of the feeds but you would need to be using a client to post and reply. On that topic, Dave has extended the source namespace with a couple of extra attributes: source:inReplyTo — an optional item level element that contains the URL of the parent post, and source:comments — an optional item level element that…