Connect your website’s RSS or Atom feed once and every new article, release or episode is posted into your Matrix room automatically — on matrix.org or on a homeserver you run yourself, with no platform gatekeeper in between.
Matrix is an open protocol for real-time communication, and it relates to Slack or Discord roughly the way email relates to a single company’s messaging product. There is no central owner. Anyone can run a homeserver, accounts on different servers talk to each other, and no single organisation can change the terms, close the API or decide your community is no longer welcome.
That independence is the entire reason people choose it. Open-source projects, universities, public institutions, privacy-minded companies and communities that have been burned by a platform change all end up on Matrix, and many of them run the server themselves.
For a publisher, this produces one of the cleanest automation targets available. There is no developer programme, no business verification, no rate-limit tier and no policy team that might reclassify your account next quarter. If you can post in a room, you can automate posting in that room.
It is also the only destination in this series where you may control the entire stack — your site, your feed, your homeserver and your room — with no third party involved at any point.
Three things are needed: a room to post into, an access token that permits posting, and a feed to read. In PostRSS the room is a Target and each automated message counts as one Task against your plan’s monthly allowance.
The usual arrangement is a dedicated account rather than your personal one — something like @postrss:your.server or @blog:your.server. It appears in the room as its own member with its own display name and avatar, which makes automated messages instantly recognisable and keeps your own account’s history clean.
Creating one takes a minute on any homeserver, and it means revoking access later affects nothing but the feed.
A Matrix access token is issued by your own homeserver. In Element you can find one under Settings → Help & About → Advanced, and homeservers also issue them through the standard login endpoint. Nobody reviews the request; the server that holds the account simply issues it.
Treat the token as a credential. It grants what that account can do, so a token for a dedicated posting account is far safer than one for an account that is in every private room in your organisation. Log the account out to invalidate the token when you want to revoke access.
Invite the posting account to the room and accept the invitation, then add the room in PostRSS. Rooms are identified either by an internal ID such as !AbCdEf:your.server or by a human-readable alias such as #blog:your.server. The alias is easier to work with, and a published room usually has one.
Make sure the account is allowed to send messages in that room. Matrix power levels can restrict sending to moderators, and a room configured that way will silently reject an ordinary member’s messages.
Paste your RSS or Atom feed address — on WordPress usually your domain followed by /feed/, with a feed available for every category and tag. Ghost, Substack, Blogger, Shopify, PrestaShop and OpenCart all expose feeds, as does every podcast host and every YouTube channel.
From then on, publishing on your site is the only action required. PostRSS checks the feed every 5 minutes on every plan, and every 1 minute on Enterprise.
This is the most important Matrix-specific detail on the page, and the most common cause of a setup that appears correct and does nothing.
Matrix supports end-to-end encryption, and many clients enable it by default when a room is created. In an encrypted room, messages are encrypted between the participating devices, and a service posting through a plain access token has no key material to encrypt with. The result is either a rejected message or one that other members see as undecryptable.
The practical answer is straightforward: use an unencrypted room for an automated feed. This costs you nothing in the cases that matter, because the content is published on your public website anyway — there is nothing to protect. Public announcement rooms are conventionally unencrypted for exactly this reason, and it also means new members can read the room’s history from before they joined, which is usually what you want for an archive of announcements.
Encryption cannot be switched off once a room has it enabled. If your intended room is already encrypted, create a new unencrypted room for the feed and keep the encrypted one for conversation. Many communities run precisely that pairing.
PostRSS sends the item’s title and a link back to the original page. Matrix messages carry both a plain-text body and an optional HTML version, so clients that support formatting show a tidy message while text-only clients and bridges still receive something readable.
Link previews work differently from every other destination in this series, and it is worth knowing why. On Matrix the preview is generated by the client, not by the server or the sender, and each user’s client decides whether to request one. Element fetches previews by default, but a user who has disabled them, or a client that does not support them, will simply see the link.
The practical consequence is that your title does more work here than elsewhere. A message whose title reads well on its own is a message that works in every client, including the bridged ones where no preview will ever appear.
Matrix’s bridges connect a room to another network — IRC, XMPP, Telegram, Discord, Slack and others — so messages flow between them.
For an automated feed this is quietly powerful. One Target posting into one Matrix room can surface in an IRC channel a project has run for twenty years and in a Telegram group its newer members prefer, without three separate automations to maintain and without three separate Tasks being consumed.
Two things to keep in mind. Bridged messages usually arrive as plain text, which reinforces the point about titles above. And bridges are operated by whoever set them up, so reliability varies; if a bridged destination matters commercially, a direct Target for that platform is the safer arrangement.
Matrix Spaces group rooms together, much as a Discord server groups channels. A project might run a Space containing #general, #support, #blog and #releases.
The structure that works is the same as everywhere else: give the automation its own room rather than putting it in the room where people talk. Members who want announcements join or watch that room; members who are there for support are not pushed past a stream of articles.
Each room is its own Target in PostRSS, so #blog and #releases can run from the same feed with different filters — articles to one, changelog entries to the other.
PostRSS applies filters before anything is sent. You can restrict a Target by category or tag, require a keyword in the title, or exclude one. On a technical community’s room this matters: members joined for releases and documentation, not for marketing posts that happen to share the feed.
Scheduling deserves particular attention if the room is bridged or if the homeserver is small. Many Matrix homeservers are run by one person on modest hardware, and a burst of messages is both impolite and occasionally throttled. A publishing window holds items found outside it and releases them inside, turning a burst into a sequence.
If you run your own homeserver — Synapse, Dendrite or Conduit — the automation is entirely within your control. You issue the token, you set the room’s power levels, you decide the rate limits, and no third party is involved between your CMS and your readers.
Two details are worth checking on a self-hosted server. Homeservers apply per-account rate limiting by default, and a posting account submitting several messages in quick succession can hit it; the limits are configurable if you administer the server. And federation must be working if you want people on other homeservers to see the room, which is the usual reason a public announcement room appears empty to outsiders.
Check the access token first. Logging the posting account out invalidates its token, and a token from a session someone closed will silently stop working. Also confirm the feed itself updated — a caching plugin serving a stale copy looks identical to a broken automation.
The room is end-to-end encrypted. Create an unencrypted room for the feed, as described above; encryption cannot be disabled on an existing room.
Check the room’s power levels. Rooms can be configured so that only moderators may post, and an ordinary member’s messages are rejected.
Previews are a client feature on Matrix. Some clients do not request them and some users disable them — this is expected behaviour rather than a fault.
That is a filter behaving as configured. Review the category, tag and keyword rules on the Target.
Compare timestamps. Under five minutes is the feed-check interval working as designed. Hours means the feed is cached, or a publishing window is holding items — check both before assuming a fault.
Each Matrix room you connect is one Target, and each automated message is one Task against your plan’s monthly allowance. Paid plans raise both numbers and add the other networks, and they are chosen on postrss.com rather than inside the mobile app.
Matrix tends to be one of the better-value Targets precisely because of bridges: a single room’s Tasks can serve readers on several networks at once.
Matrix is the self-hosted answer to the same problem a Discord channel and a Telegram channel solve, with the difference that no company sits between you and your readers. Bridges mean one Matrix room can also surface in both of those.
If independence is what brought you here, Mastodon is the timeline equivalent, and a webhook into n8n is the piece that lets a self-hosted stack do the rest without a commercial platform anywhere in the chain.
No. Publishing uses an access token issued by your own homeserver, ideally for a dedicated posting account. Logging that account out invalidates the token.
An automated feed should use an unencrypted room. A service posting through an access token has no key material for end-to-end encryption, and the content is public on your website in any case.
Yes, and identically. Matrix’s federation means the setup does not depend on which server your account lives on.
That depends on each reader’s client. Previews are generated client-side on Matrix, so write titles that work without one.
Yes, through bridges. A bridged room forwards messages to IRC, Telegram, Discord and others, usually as plain text.
No. PostRSS publishes items that appear in the feed after the Target starts running.
Create a dedicated posting account, create an unencrypted room for announcements, invite the account and give it permission to send. Point one filtered feed at it and publish something. If the room is bridged, check how the message looks on the other side — that is usually the version that tells you whether your titles are doing their job.
