4 ms·

I am still not super sold on the ActivityPub format as being better than RSS, any dissenters want to change my mind?

by g82918 7y ago

ericflo 7y ago
It's like the difference between a static website and a JavaScript web application. RSS is straightforward, ubiquitous, and thus maybe superior for one-way publishing. But if your content needs a more stateful interaction with its consumers, you'll end up needing the richer set of actions provided by ActivityPub.
cjslep 7y ago
My blog's ActivityPub system is both pushing content out (similar to, but not quite the same as, RSS) and accepts responses as comments (nothing like RSS). (My blog's currently down due to too much unrelated tinkering).
- josteink 7y ago
  So in summary: RSS is simple, mature and works. ActivityPub is still experimental, and you may not even need it.
  - cjslep 7y ago
    I don't understand how your conclusions were reached from my post. My blog's content is natively shown inline with other content on Pleroma. To a Pleroma user, it and responses seem like all other native posts and interactions. They can click its ID to go through to my original blog. There, everyone sees my blog and its style, as well as the same responses as native comments. Back on Pleroma, those users can boost it and share it with others (their followers). Virality achieved. No further engineering needed from me to enable that. That's federated social networking. Imagine writing a YouTube comment from Twitter's interface and your Twitter account. In this case, my blog's content -- not just links -- natively pops up in followers' feeds when I publish something. And since ActivityPub is built on and compatible with RDF, this could be extended to all sorts of domains and interactions.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > (My blog's currently down due to too much unrelated tinkering). Oh good, I'm not the only one with a broken blog:) I discovered recently that while my blog is up, I didn't have source files that would generate the site as it exists on the server. Nice to know other people have similar things going on:)
tedunangst 7y ago
Push tends to be more efficient, and more responsive, for content that updates less frequently than the polling interval.
- csande17 7y ago
  Personally, I like WebSub a lot more than ActivityPub for this use case. ActivityPub seems really complicated (there's inboxes and actors and objects and activities and like twenty different message types), while WebSub is pretty much just a way to broadcast "hey, my feed updated, go download it if you want": https://indieweb.org/How_to_publish_and_consume_WebSub https://indieweb.org/How_to_publish_and_consume_WebSub
- rambojazz 7y ago
  Also without "pushes" every actor should "follow" any other existing actor just to check if there are messages for them. Like my email server having to poll every other email server in the world to discover if I have new messages.
  - Boulth 7y ago
    >Like my email server having to poll every other email server in the world to discover if I have new messages. In AP you don't need to follow anyone to have messages for you delivered directly to your inbox. You have to check other servers if you're interested in messages to others but I guess there is no analog to that for email.
    - rambojazz 7y ago
      Yes that's what I wrote too. Because AP provides a mechanism to "push" messages more or less like emails, one does not need to follow/subscribe to anything in order to receive messages unlike RSS where one does have to subscribe.
- solatic 7y ago
  That's a pure efficiency perspective. When discussing content sources, however, privacy is also an important concern. By necessity, a push-based protocol needs to know who to push to. A pull-based protocol only needs to respond to requests, which may be anonymized. The operator of an RSS feed gets a list of source IP addresses of feed requests - and that's it.
rambojazz 7y ago
How do you even compare the two? With RSS you aggregate information from different XML sources; with AP there are "actors" sending/receiving JSON(LD) messages to each other.
bjoli 7y ago
I agree with you. When I saw this project I thought "the bulk of this should be about 50 lines of XSLT and then a simple script to manage push". I am probably underestimating the complexity of the problem, but I have a feeling that this is a "I hacked this together in an hour and it works a lot better than expected" type of problem.

I am still not super sold on the ActivityPub format as being better than RSS, any dissenters want to change my mind?

by g82918 7y ago

I am still not super sold on the ActivityPub format as being better than RSS, any dissenters want to change my mind?

It's like the difference between a static website and a JavaScript web application. RSS is straightforward, ubiquitous, and thus maybe superior for one-way publishing. But if your content needs a more stateful interaction with its consumers, you'll end up needing the richer set of actions provided by ActivityPub.

cjslep 7y ago

My blog's ActivityPub system is both pushing content out (similar to, but not quite the same as, RSS) and accepts responses as comments (nothing like RSS). (My blog's currently down due to too much unrelated tinkering).

josteink 7y ago
So in summary: RSS is simple, mature and works. ActivityPub is still experimental, and you may not even need it.
- cjslep 7y ago
  I don't understand how your conclusions were reached from my post. My blog's content is natively shown inline with other content on Pleroma. To a Pleroma user, it and responses seem like all other native posts and interactions. They can click its ID to go through to my original blog. There, everyone sees my blog and its style, as well as the same responses as native comments. Back on Pleroma, those users can boost it and share it with others (their followers). Virality achieved. No further engineering needed from me to enable that. That's federated social networking. Imagine writing a YouTube comment from Twitter's interface and your Twitter account. In this case, my blog's content -- not just links -- natively pops up in followers' feeds when I publish something. And since ActivityPub is built on and compatible with RDF, this could be extended to all sorts of domains and interactions.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> (My blog's currently down due to too much unrelated tinkering). Oh good, I'm not the only one with a broken blog:) I discovered recently that while my blog is up, I didn't have source files that would generate the site as it exists on the server. Nice to know other people have similar things going on:)

tedunangst 7y ago

Push tends to be more efficient, and more responsive, for content that updates less frequently than the polling interval.

csande17 7y ago
Personally, I like WebSub a lot more than ActivityPub for this use case. ActivityPub seems really complicated (there's inboxes and actors and objects and activities and like twenty different message types), while WebSub is pretty much just a way to broadcast "hey, my feed updated, go download it if you want": https://indieweb.org/How_to_publish_and_consume_WebSub https://indieweb.org/How_to_publish_and_consume_WebSub
rambojazz 7y ago
Also without "pushes" every actor should "follow" any other existing actor just to check if there are messages for them. Like my email server having to poll every other email server in the world to discover if I have new messages.
- Boulth 7y ago
  >Like my email server having to poll every other email server in the world to discover if I have new messages. In AP you don't need to follow anyone to have messages for you delivered directly to your inbox. You have to check other servers if you're interested in messages to others but I guess there is no analog to that for email.
  - rambojazz 7y ago
    Yes that's what I wrote too. Because AP provides a mechanism to "push" messages more or less like emails, one does not need to follow/subscribe to anything in order to receive messages unlike RSS where one does have to subscribe.
solatic 7y ago
That's a pure efficiency perspective. When discussing content sources, however, privacy is also an important concern. By necessity, a push-based protocol needs to know who to push to. A pull-based protocol only needs to respond to requests, which may be anonymized. The operator of an RSS feed gets a list of source IP addresses of feed requests - and that's it.

rambojazz 7y ago

How do you even compare the two? With RSS you aggregate information from different XML sources; with AP there are "actors" sending/receiving JSON(LD) messages to each other.

bjoli 7y ago

I agree with you. When I saw this project I thought "the bulk of this should be about 50 lines of XSLT and then a simple script to manage push". I am probably underestimating the complexity of the problem, but I have a feeling that this is a "I hacked this together in an hour and it works a lot better than expected" type of problem.