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?
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.