RSS Pipe: Introduction

With social media platforms coming and going, the open web and particularly RSS is my preferred way to consume and also distribute content. While I had my phase where I stubbornly rejected any of the social media platforms, I have come to terms and recognise that everyone has different preferences and also ways of using social media, both centralised and decentralised. Some enjoy the social context to connect with others, some use social media timelines to receive news & updates, and others to login to services. For me personally, the most sane and interesting way to consume and distribute content is RSS.

While I haven't been writing much in the past few years, it is something that I'd like to do more of in 2025. Acknowledging that others use social media to consume content and perhaps read the one or other post from my blog, I wanted a way to create on my blog and automatically post to various social media platforms. With a quick search for services that would do that for me, I found that they would either be expensive, complicated or ask for full access to my social media accounts, which is something that I wouldn't be happy with. Perhaps I missed the perfect service, but I love to create software, so I decided to create my own. Let me introduce you to RSS Pipe, a web service that takes your RSS (Atom & JSON) feed and posts to social media accounts (Bluesky and Mastodon, with Threads and more following soon).

My initial focus has been to solve my own needs, which might not align with everyone else's needs, but it's a start - so here what's important to me:

Multiple social media accounts

On my blog, I want to write about a wide range of things including what I'm working on (like RSS Pipe), our slow nomadic travel and whatever I find interesting and have thoughts about. This means that I want to post to my personal bluesky and mastodon accounts as well as the RSS Pipe bluesky and mastodon accounts, depending on what I write about.

Minimal required permission scope

I want to only use the permissions that are required for the offered functionality, rather than having full access to connected social media accounts. Bluesky doesn't offer granular scopes as of right now, however Mastodon does.

Multiple feeds

I want to write all my content on my personal site, no matter if long form posts like this one, or short form notes where I share status updates. Posts and Notes have their dedicated RSS feeds, which I want to both connect to the relevant social accounts.

Templates

Depending on the feed and in the future also on the social media account that the post is created on, I want a template that takes variables (supporting Liquid templating language) from the RSS feed as well as each page's meta data, so I can define this...

{{feed_title}}
{{feed_link}}

{{meta_rsspipe-hashtags}}

... which creates a post like this:

RSS Pipe: Introduction
https://michaelloistl.com/posts/rss-pipe-introduction

#rss #rsspipe

Page specific meta variables

Just like "open graph" tags, I want to use "rsspipe tags" like rsspipe:tags, rsspipe:categories, rsspipe:attachments, rsspipe:bluesky and rsspipe:mastodon, which add page specific data and control. rsspipe:bluesky and rsspipe:mastodon for example allow me to control via my CMS if individual posts shall be posted to Bluesky and Mastodon.

Webhook trigger

While I support intervals that feeds are fetched (like every 5min, 15min, 30min, etc.), I also want the option to trigger the fetch via webhook instead. I'm using Kirby as my blog CMS, which makes it easy to add hooks that are triggered after publishing a post, so I can just call a feed specific webhook, which then fetches the RSS feed and creates all the social media posts. I prefer this over recurring intervals as it's much more energy efficient. So RSS Pipe offers both, intervals and webhooks.

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There is much more to it, but these are the main features that I wanted and those are available now. There are also a few things that I wouldn't need for myself, so those have been lower priority but are coming next:

• Privacy Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Account management (change email and password, delete account)

RSS Pipe is currently in open beta and will be free to use until it's out of beta. I'm planning to also reward early access users joining during the beta with extended free accounts as thank you for their time and feedback.

I'd love to hear from you what your needs would be; until then, my next priorities are:

• Media uploads / Attachments
• Categories & Filters