Textcaster

Textcaster, also known as RSC (Really Simple Conversations), is a federated social platform that treats every post as an RSS feed entry. Instead of building yet another proprietary social network, it uses open web standards so your content stays portable and readable by any RSS client. You can follow people, have threaded conversations, and join communities, all without locking your data into a platform that might disappear or change its rules.

The problem it addresses is the familiar one of social media lock-in. The platforms you use today hold your posts, your connections, and your history. If they shut down, change policies, or just make the experience worse, you lose everything. Textcaster flips that by making your feed the thing you own. Posts, replies, and full conversation threads travel as RSS, which means federation between instances works without any proprietary protocol. Anyone can read your feed, whether they use Textcaster or just a feed reader.

Under the hood, the architecture is straightforward. Each instance runs independently, but instances can see and interact with each other through RSS. When you follow someone on another instance, you're subscribing to their feed. When you reply, your reply appears in the conversation thread and shows up in their feed reader too. The threading model keeps conversations intact across servers, which is what makes it feel like a social network rather than a collection of blogs.

Who it's for is self-hosting enthusiasts, independent writers, and communities that value data ownership over polish. If you're comfortable running your own server or want to join a small instance run by people you trust, Textcaster gives you a social experience without the trade-offs of centralized platforms. It's not trying to compete with Twitter or Threads on scale or features. It's for people who've decided the trade-offs aren't worth it.

What makes it different from other federated networks is the simplicity of the underlying standard. ActivityPub and similar protocols are powerful but complex. RSS is old, boring, and universally supported. That means federation comes almost for free, and you can always export your data to something else because it's just feeds.

The software is open source and free to use. Multiple public instances are already running, and you can join one or spin up your own. There's no paid tier because the point is ownership, not monetization.