4 ms·

Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related or responsive to another RSS item? (Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)

by Digory 8y ago

zanny 8y ago
Mastodon has per-user RSS feeds you can subscribe to but they are non-interactive. For interactive communications ActivityPub is the standard at play and the one to promote. Let RSS be good at one-way consumption and ActivityPub be good at bi-directional communication.
- mooreds 8y ago
  More about activitypub: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
vshabanov 8y ago
There is a standard <wfw:commentRss> item that exists in almost any Wordpress blog feed. And my feed reader (https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com) supports it for years. But blog post comments is completely another medium from Twitter. It requires you to sign in and, since comment will be there forever, you usually put more effort in it. So comments are more rare and of higher quality. But at the same time you could sign in as anonymous and put your spam link or some ego bullshit -- which frequently happen on popular sites. So it's very dependent from community. And if you comment on some blog post only readers of this post will see (and they will know the context). When you comment on Twitter -- anybody could see. Together with 280 character limit this leads to completely different kind of discussion.
ttepasse 8y ago
The classic relation is a link. Atom has the Atom Threading Extensions, to document conversation in feeds. One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think. There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes. And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)
- vshabanov 8y ago
  Thank you for information. It seems that Salmon is used in Diaspora so it somehow could work. > But that started with a privacy scandal What was the privacy scandal? > The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes. What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?

Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related or responsive to another RSS item? (Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)

by Digory 8y ago

Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related or responsive to another RSS item? (Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)

zanny 8y ago

Mastodon has per-user RSS feeds you can subscribe to but they are non-interactive. For interactive communications ActivityPub is the standard at play and the one to promote. Let RSS be good at one-way consumption and ActivityPub be good at bi-directional communication.

mooreds 8y ago
More about activitypub: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

vshabanov 8y ago

There is a standard <wfw:commentRss> item that exists in almost any Wordpress blog feed. And my feed reader (https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com) supports it for years. But blog post comments is completely another medium from Twitter. It requires you to sign in and, since comment will be there forever, you usually put more effort in it. So comments are more rare and of higher quality. But at the same time you could sign in as anonymous and put your spam link or some ego bullshit -- which frequently happen on popular sites. So it's very dependent from community. And if you comment on some blog post only readers of this post will see (and they will know the context). When you comment on Twitter -- anybody could see. Together with 280 character limit this leads to completely different kind of discussion.

ttepasse 8y ago

The classic relation is a link. Atom has the Atom Threading Extensions, to document conversation in feeds. One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think. There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes. And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)

vshabanov 8y ago
Thank you for information. It seems that Salmon is used in Diaspora so it somehow could work. > But that started with a privacy scandal What was the privacy scandal? > The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes. What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?