RSS is one of those humble protocols that glues the web. It was born out of the same values (openness, data portability, ...) that are the foundation of Nostr.
You may not be aware, but you can already export most of the content you create and publish today into an RSS feed.
- Most blog platforms allow users to make their content available as an RSS feed.
- Most bookmark services allow users to create an RSS feed from their bookmarks.
- Plenty of third-party services enable the creation of RSS feeds for your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook accounts (think RSS.app, IFTTT, ...).
- Most podcast platforms generate an RSS feed for your show.
- ...
On the other hand, Nostr is poised to become the new web infrastructure. It will dismantle the walled gardens we've been living in for too long and is already shaping an ecosystem of decentralized apps that will gradually replace centralized ones, one by one.
Connecting RSS and Nostr is obviously a necessary step to accelerate the transition toward this new web powered by Nostr. This Geyser Project (link below) aims to build the necessary momentum to create a tool that enables everyone to make the most of RSS in a Nostr world.
Applications are countless: just imagine turning the RSS feed of bookmarks about a specific topic into a nice stream of Nostr notes pushed to a specific npub profile, and then transformin those Nostr notes into a beautiful website built with Npub.pro.
ā Help me build rss2nostr!
I'm fully aware there are already a few tools out there attempting this, but all of them are quite limited in features or designed to only serve tech users.
What we need is a web app that allows users to:
- Submit the RSS feed they want to connect with Nostr
- Define rules and parameters for converting RSS items into Nostr events
- Specify the Nostr profile they would like to publish the events to
Furthermore, using a liberal open-source license, we may enable the development of competing/specialized web apps.