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Atom feeds

Every Sifa profile publishes an Atom XML feed of its activity. Subscribe in any feed reader (NetNewsWire, Reeder, Feedly, etc.) to follow someone without an Atmosphere account.

Every public Sifa ID profile publishes an Atom feed of its activity. Anyone with a feed reader can subscribe to it. You need no Sifa account, no Bluesky account, and no AT Protocol identity. Open web, open standards, open subscriptions.

The URL pattern

https://sifa.id/p/<username>/activity.atom

Examples:

  • https://sifa.id/p/alice.bsky.social/activity.atom
  • https://sifa.id/p/alice.com/activity.atom (custom domain username)

You do not have to remember the exact path. Feed readers usually auto-discover the feed from the profile's HTML. Most apps accept the regular profile URL (https://sifa.id/p/alice.bsky.social). They then find the feed themselves from the <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"> tag in the page head.

How to subscribe

In most feed readers (NetNewsWire, Reeder, Feedly, Inoreader, FreshRSS, Miniflux, NewsBlur) the flow is the same:

  1. Copy the Sifa profile URL.
  2. In your reader, hit Add Feed (or equivalent).
  3. Paste the profile URL.

If the reader does not auto-discover, paste the explicit /activity.atom URL instead.

What ends up in the feed

The feed mirrors the rules in Activity feed: the "Made" entries (articles, reviews, repos, RSVPs, and other things you create), not the "Did" entries (likes, follows, reposts).

That keeps the feed useful as a way to follow someone's work, not a firehose of every tap they make on the network.

Refresh interval

The edge caches the feed for 30 minutes (Cache-Control: public, max-age=1800). A reader that polls more often than that reads the cache, and it sees no new entries until the cache expires. That is what most well-behaved readers default to anyway.

Do you need data fresher than 30 minutes, because your software reacts to new Sifa activity? Read the AT Protocol firehose directly. Do not poll the Atom feed.

Why we publish the Atom feed

Three reasons:

  • Read access without an account. Someone reading this docs page may not want a Bluesky or Sifa account just to keep tabs on what you publish. A feed reader is enough.
  • Long-time-horizon readers. Feed readers outlast platforms. People who subscribed to your blog in 2007 may still subscribe in 2026. Atom feeds give your Sifa profile that same durability.
  • Bridge to non-Atmosphere apps. Tools that do not yet understand AT Protocol (link aggregators, automation services, custom dashboards) can still ingest your activity through plain XML.

What is not in the feed

  • Private fields. There are none on Sifa profiles, so this is mostly an academic point.
  • "Did" activity (likes, reposts, follows). See Activity feed for why.
  • Real-time updates. The 30-minute cache is by design. Use the firehose for real time.
  • Cross-account aggregation. The feed is per-profile. There is no "everyone you follow" feed yet.

Supported apps

Every app Sifa reads activity from, and why some of what you do on them never reaches your profile.

External accounts

How to link your blog, GitHub, ORCID, and other profiles to Sifa, so work you publish elsewhere reaches your professional page. Sifa finds RSS feeds for you.

On this page

The URL patternHow to subscribeWhat ends up in the feedRefresh intervalWhy we publish the Atom feedWhat is not in the feed