RuSShdown

What is RuSShdown?

RuSShdown is a free, open-source, entirely browser-based RSS feed generator for non-coders. RuSShdown takes the Posting experience like you'd find on Cohost, where you type your gay little jokes and hit the button, and translates that into an RSS feed you can slap on your personal site. The whole site runs entirely client-side, so literally nothing ever leaves your browser to some server somewhere, it all runs on your computer, and it has zero tracking cookies or anything of the sort.

How do I use RuSShdown?

It's pretty simple. You go to RuSShdown's deployment page at https://chaiaeran.github.io/RuSShdown and simply fill out the form. If you're making an RSS feed for the first time, you use the Create New RSS Feed tab. If you already have one and want to Post to it, you use the Add Post tab. Either way, when you're done, you'll receive an RSS file that you can then put wherever you like, such as a Neocities page.

It's really that easy?

Well, yeah! RSS-posting isn't super technically difficult to begin with, and the purpose of RuSShdown is to simplify it even further so you don't have to touch a single line of XML or HTML code. The site does all that for you.

Can I use Markdown?

That's what the "down" in RuSShdown stands for! Standard Markdown is supported using Showdownjs. You can even input raw HTML if you wanna do CSS Crimes™! There's a live preview right beside your input box, so you can see what your Post will look like.

Why did you make this?

Because fuck social media, that's why. With Cohost shutting down, it feels like the last big space made for actual human connection is going away, and I have no desire to go back to the Tweet Zone, be it Twitter itself, Bluesky, or even the Fediverse. RSS feeds are really powerful, useful tech that lets you keep Posting the way we do here (minus likes and comments, admittedly), and I found there really wasn't a good tool to make them easier, so I did it myself.

Can I see the code?

Yep! Here it is! https://github.com/ChaiaEran/RuSShdown
It's honestly not very complicated, either.

OK but is there Eggbug

I hope you all enjoy using RuSShdown.

Happy Posting!

I think it would be really, genuinely cool if we had a network of RSS feeds from Cohost users so we can keep Posting. It wouldn't be super difficult to implement, but it does require some level of technical knowledge, unless someone is just mirroring a blog to RSS, which isn't quite the same thing, and for a lot of people, Posting is when they push the button and make the Funny Jokes. So, here are a few proposals:

I don't think there are literally Nazis on this site, it's got too strong a Jewish community for that. But the same ethos hasn't been adequately directed towards racism, and the result has been, bluntly, disastrous. I was here when the site was tiny (my account was activated July 2022), and that's when this shit should have been rooted out. We had fucking essays about the direction we wanted the site to go. In particular I remember being uncomfortable with the site being reified as inherently safe by design, and the general response to the post I wrote about it, while positive, had an undercurrent of "it's alright, everything's fine, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

We really fucking didn't, and I am not happy about being vindicated. If Cohost's white users (including myself, i am not exempt from "fuck 'em" when relevant) had turned on the first instance of racism and gone "we don't do that here, fuck off", as is our moral fucking duty to do, maybe the site's users of colour wouldn't be in as shitty a situation as they are now.

Racism is a white people problem. It's a thing we made, a thing we uphold, and a thing we're morally obligated to join the work to dismantle. So quit whining, dry the white tears, and let's do the work people of colour need from us.

it would slap even more with an unread notifier, like in RSS feeds. (Feature request here.) It wouldn't have to directly track what posts you read, just which users have new posts since the last time you loaded the follow view.