▌ Phosphor

The Doorbell for the Dev Blog: Why We Ship an RSS Feed

September 17, 2026

Every post from this dev log — 39 of them now, from “Why I’m Building a BBS in 2026” to this morning’s piece on the three-door security model — is available over RSS at:

https://phosphorbbs.net/index.xml

Paste that into any feed reader and the posts come to you as they publish. That’s the whole feature. But it’s worth a short post, because RSS is doing something specific for this project, and because most readers stopped being shown how feeds work about fifteen years ago.

Why a feed and not just the blog page

The obvious answer first: the feed means you don’t have to remember this site exists. You add it once, and every new post — the next deep-dive on Phosphor’s menu restructure, the next war story about a bug that only reproduced on real hardware — shows up in your reader the morning it ships. No checking back, no “did I miss anything” ritual.

But the deeper reason is what the feed doesn’t have. There’s no ranking deciding which posts you see. No follower count gating whether a post reaches you. No “engagement” metric deciding that yesterday’s post wasn’t interesting enough to notify you about. The feed has one rule: everything, in order, forever. It’s the dumbest possible distribution system, and that’s exactly why it’s trustworthy.

That’s also the spirit of the whole project. Phosphor BBS is a DTP server — a digital third place you run yourself, where the community owns the rules instead of renting them from a platform. A dev blog with an RSS feed is the same arrangement for writing: I publish on my own server, you subscribe from wherever you like, and no third party sits in the middle deciding who sees what.

How to subscribe

The feed is a plain RSS 2.0 document — every feed reader takes it as-is:

  • NetNewsWire (Mac/iOS) — free, open source, our pick
  • Feedbin or Inoreader — web-based, syncs across devices
  • Thunderbird, Emacs elfeed, or any reader you already use — the URL is the only setup

There’s no account, no email address, nothing to confirm. The reader polls the feed, the feed lists the posts. That’s the deal.

What shows up in it

This dev log is written as features ship, not after they’ve grown stale. Recent entries:

  • Whitelist, Gray List, Blacklist — the three-door security model behind Phosphor’s connection handling, including the telnet enforcement gap that started it
  • Page Sysop — the classic BBS ritual back with an APNs push twist
  • Hal: An AI SysOp That Never Leaves the Server — local-Ollama-only AI, off-grid by design
  • Threading the Flood — what a month of echomail dedup fixes teaches about federation

If you’re building your own community server — or just curious what it costs to run a place that’s actually yours — those are the posts worth catching. The feed is how you catch them.

Add https://phosphorbbs.net/index.xml to your reader, and we’ll keep the posts coming.