I know they’re quite different technically. But practically, what does ActivityPub unlock that was not previously possible with RSS and basic web tech stack?
I think I have an idea of the answer. RSS may provide a way for users to “subscribe” to content from a feed, equivalent of following and putting it in a unified feed.
But it does not have a way for users to interact with the poster, like comments or likes. This may be possible with a basic web stack though, but either users will have to make accounts on every person’s site, or the site has to accept no user auth. (but this could be resolved with a identity provider standard, like disqus does)
I suppose another thing activityPub does is distribute content to multiple servers. Not sure if this is really desirable though?
Anyways, did I miss anything?
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Thanks for confirming! However my question is if that’s all, or if there’s more. I assume you mean that’s it.
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That’s most of it. ActivityPub also makes it possible to know who is subscribed. It’s very hard to count how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed.
Not really. They’re making requests, probably at least once a day. That makes it very easy to count active users. With subscribers, you can have a big number, but they’re not necessarily all active, and unless they’re on your instance, you can’t see how often they’re reading.
They’re making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or one user might have multiple IPs.
Or back in the days where Google Reader was a thing, one request from them could represent millions of readers.
I’d argue it’s still a better representation than subscriber count. It is similar to the disparity between YouTube’s subscriber count vs video view count.
Deduplicate by IP/user-agent and you’ll get a pretty accurate count. Some people might be moving between wifi and data, but for the most part you can account for that. Same process as fingerprinting a browser.
Yes, it’s possible to get a rough estimate with some technical work, but AP makes it easy for anyone.
AP doesn’t really do this. A subscriber may be a dead account, or may be someone that hasn’t checked your feed in months. Even a technical analysis would be difficult here.
RSS readers just fetch a certain .rss file from a website and render that for you. RSS is a simple tool, it’s not even comparable to something like ActivityPub.
You also have no way of discovering new stuff, you have to find them yourself. Whereas with ActivityPub you can. Nor can you interact with the feed objects (comment, like, etc).
I’d argue that discoverability on fediverse kinda sucks.
There’s the network effect kind of discoverability, where someone you follow reposts something, and you discover this new something and possibly follow it. RSS has all the technology necessary to make this happen.
There’s the discoversbility where you sort by “New” or “all” on your fediverse feed. I suppose that is discoverability that RSS doesn’t have natively, but I’d argue this sucks pretty badly.
Last, there’s the search engine type of discoverability, where you search through fediverse communities or users. This isn’t native to ActivityPub, and a RSS search engine can be implemented pretty similarly.
In summary, So activityPub might have some discoverability paths, but the one that RSS doesn’t have natively, I argue sucks and is not the right way to do it.
Ok? What exactly are you trying to tell me with this? RSS still has no builtin discoverability tool, that’s a fact and won’t change.
I am responding to your point about RSS not having ability to discover new content whereas activityPub can. I summarized my point in the last paragraph. To reiterate, I agree that RSS doesn’t have built in discoverability, but whatever ActivityPub has is not solving the discoverability problem. Let me know which part you don’t understand please and I’d be glad to clarify.
I disagree. Discoverability is to discover new stuff from new places you haven’t seen before. In Lemmy, for example, I can sort by All/New and I’ll discover lots of new things I haven’t seen from new places. Interesting to me or not, there’s discoverability.
Respond and interact with content. Whatever it may be. In most sites, that means using their singular platform with their rules. With Activity hub, it means using many potentially different platforms to communicate.
I personally use both rss and activity hub. Works pretty well. One to inform and one to communicate with.
ActivityPub acts like two-way RSS
Anyways, did I miss anything?
I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.
A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.
The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.
Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.
From what I see, ActivityPub doesn’t seem to solve the problem of sorting or prioritizing content. In fact, I believe RSS wins here, because it is easier to do this on the client side with RSS, as it is assumed the client has all the content from the RSS feed without any biased order, whereas with activity pub, it varies by provider and instance.
Sorting and filtering can be done well on the client side, and the plus side is the user can have a ton of choice here. It just so happens that our algorithms for that in the open source world are no match for the addiction-inducing ones of Twitter and others.
You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.
That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.
I fully agree with you, but I think this isn’t because RSS clients can’t do this from a technical perspective. I suppose most RSS clients come from people with anti algorithm sentiment, but realistically, a RSS client has all what it needs to implement basic or advanced sorting and filtering.
But I agree with you that most rss readers out there have that problem.
I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.
- If you don’t have a specific interest and/or lack the skill of finding new content that you like , RSS mostly won’t help you unless it has a " suggestion " feature , while on ActivityPub ( or any other social media ) you can find new content that might or might not suit you just by browsing
- RSS is read-only , ActivityPub is not
Activitypub can include private messages
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