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Anyone know of independent RSS services like OpenRSS?
Does anyone know of a reliable Site-to-RSS service like OpenRSS? I’m thinking of sites that ingest a social media timeline – instagram, bluesky, threads – and turn it into an rss-feed.
The background:
For years I used Tweetledee on my server to generate an RSS feed from Twitter accounts, which was then ingested by sml_xml to embed a custom timeline that matched the site’s design and didn’t track casual visitors.
That service is now defunct since everyone’s favourite billionaire took it over and now that Twitter’s days are over, I’ve now been asked to embed a Bluesky timeline.
Bluesky does provide an RSS feed of its own, but it’s very sparse, with seemingly just the titles and no post content or re-posts. I’d ideally like to make the output match the site’s design and not spam or track its visitors, hence my interest in an RSS-style solution.
After stumbling across various paid-services (like rss.app that looks free but is actually only free for 7 days), I found OpenRSS. It worked straight away, and I thought I’d struck gold. However, it seems they have been hammered by bots, and have thus restricted their service to only update feeds to verified RSS apps. So, I wrote to them explaining my low-usage situation and asking for verification, but it seems their service is not designed for personal usage, and they said flat-out “no”. The openrss.org site seems to be down at the time of writing, so they may be fighting more general problems. Perhaps there is some way of using OpenRSS with a verified self-hosted RSS app, and then sourcing a new rss feed from that app to embed a timeline, but before I try to cobble together a relay of many working parts, I thought I’d ask if you know of any alternatives.
I don’t have access to the Bluesky account in question, so can’t use the account’s password credentials (I may be able to ask them to create an app password, though). I found I was able to successfully embed a timeline using the bsky-embed (GitHub) webcomponent. It does work well, showing more actual post content and re-posts, but … at 1.3 MB, the js is anything but lean, and … frustratingly … the webcomponent setup makes it hard to style to match the site**. Webcomponents have their own shadow DOM that you can’t target directly via CSS, and anyway it uses tailwind making it difficult to target specific elements. You can squish it into a narrower container and enforce some font styles for the container’s child selectors, but it still breaks out of its box at times. It would do for an unfussy client not too bothered about display anomalies but I’m not entirely sold on it.
There are various home-grown bluesky PHP SDKs out there, which might be possible candidates but again look like a lot to install on a site just to embed a clean, non-spammy timeline. For example, I don’t need to post to Bluesky from the homepage, so I have no need for full-blown user-authentication that a lot of these SDKs come with.
Long story short: I’m still on the lookout for a good site-to-RSS service … or maybe another idea of how to simply embed a timeline. I’d especially be interested in using something like this to embed lo-fi Instagram feeds without spamming visitors.*
*To be clear: I think it’s legit for services want to track visitors on their own sites but invasive that they track users on other sites even when they do not interact with the widgets.
**EDIT: must correct myself: the bsky-embed webcomponent does provide a method for injecting own styles into the webcomponent, so you do have a bit more styling control.
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Re: Anyone know of independent RSS services like OpenRSS?
Hmmm, a conundrum. RSS was such a useful thing until social media replaced it as a platform for people with the loudest voices.
The only viable one I can find is RSSHub. All the rest seem to want an arm and a leg or are just readers.
Oh, there’s also PolitePol if you can stay under the usage limits.
Not really sure if either of those has the functionality you need.
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