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What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't?

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?

Steve ,

Basically RRS as you said, is a one way street. There is no feedback. Its not so much communication, but broadcasting.

Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

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.

catloaf ,

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.

Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

They’re making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or I’ve use might have multiple IPs.

matcha_addict OP ,

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.

catloaf ,

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.

Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

Yes, it’s possible to get a rough estimate with some technical work, but AP makes it easy for anyone.

jonne ,

Or back in the days where Google Reader was a thing, one request from them could represent millions of readers.

rglullis , (edited )
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

This may be possible with a basic web stack

“basic web tech stack” is quite a bit hand-wavy, don’t you think?

Yeah, indieweb sites could do a lot of things: authn and authz, content syndication, backlinking, Social Graph, etc. But none of them had been standardized and put into one single protocol. ActivityPub is precisely this protocol.

Saying that “we can do that with a basic web stack” is not that different from saying “we can have a protocol to publish XML content without styling using a basic web stack, why do we need RSS or Atom?”

matcha_addict OP ,

You’re right, it is hand wavy.

But I think it is valid for every blog to have things like comments and likes in their own way, if they’re okay with users not being authenticated.

But yes, it makes sense this is where activity Pub shines.

rglullis ,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

But I don’t understand what you are trying to argue. Do you think that AP is only meant to be a single improvement about existing implementation for (micro)blogs?

matcha_addict OP ,

Not arguing anything, just asking questions to confirm my understanding (and I believe I got my answers so we’re good).

I don’t know what you mean by single improvement, but I don’t think that is my position, no.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

But it does not have a way for users to interact with the poster, like comments or likes

You answered your own question.

matcha_addict OP ,

Thanks for confirming! However my question is if that’s all, or if there’s more. I assume you mean that’s it.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

I mean I’m far from an expert on the subject but yes.

tuckerm ,

Yep, that's basically all of it. ActivityPub allows a reader to send messages back to the original poster. Those messages can be a comment, or a like, an upvote, a downvote, or a many others. That's what ActivityPub unlocks compared to RSS.

RSS only goes one way: the reader can read messages from the poster, but not send any messages to the poster.

edit: if anyone is curious about what the "many other" messages can be, the list is here, under Verbs: https://github.com/activitystreams/activity-schema/blob/master/activity-schema.md#verbs

Technically, that is part of ActivityStreams, not ActivityPub. But there is a lot of overlap there, and ActivityStreams is a necessary addition. For example, downvotes on Lemmy are not part of AP, but you'll find them in AS, called "dislike."

mesamunefire ,

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.

abff08f4813c ,

The really intriguing thing about ActivityPub, at least to me, is it's capability and potential to be a bridge for many other protocols.

For example, here's ActivityPub via email: https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/apas.html

That page also references the longstanding NNTP(Usenet)-email bridge that existed for the linux-kernel mailing list, so we could get ActivityPub to Usenet.

In fact there are a couple of RSS->Mastodon projects out there already, such as https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub or https://github.com/jehna/mastofeeder

matcha_addict OP ,

Is there something about activity Pub that enables it do this, that other protocols or architectures wouldn’t have?

SubArcticTundra ,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Do you know if they’re an ActivityPub-BlueSky bridge in the works?

tunetardis ,

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.

matcha_addict OP ,

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.

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