Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? (lemy.lol)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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.