4 ms·

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.
eecc 7y ago
But it also increases load on small yet popular sources. On the other hand proxies, conditional request headers and HTTP 304 make for a great yet simple distributed caching infrastructure. Of course if you’re thinking in terms of “broadcast internet” with a Facebook at its center you may be correct
- zaarn 7y ago
  Mail is also push based, seems to work fine without a caching infrastructure.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    What do you think an MTA, MDA, and mail stores are?
    - zaarn 7y ago
      They're not really caches, they're storage infrastructure. There is still a difference between cache and what's on hard disk.
  - kickscondor 7y ago
    Mmmm, RSS over e-mail. Is it bad that I want this?
    - csande17 7y ago
      Isn't that just a mailing list?
      - kickscondor 7y ago
        I guess I need to clarify. I don't want email summaries of blogs - that would be awful. I want websites to offer the ability to send raw RSS feeds over email as a push service. So basically WebSub but you don't need to run a WebSub server - you could just parse feeds using, for example, a procmail script. Email is already a well-supported protocol; WebSub is not.

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.

eecc 7y ago

But it also increases load on small yet popular sources. On the other hand proxies, conditional request headers and HTTP 304 make for a great yet simple distributed caching infrastructure. Of course if you’re thinking in terms of “broadcast internet” with a Facebook at its center you may be correct

zaarn 7y ago
Mail is also push based, seems to work fine without a caching infrastructure.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  What do you think an MTA, MDA, and mail stores are?
  - zaarn 7y ago
    They're not really caches, they're storage infrastructure. There is still a difference between cache and what's on hard disk.
- kickscondor 7y ago
  Mmmm, RSS over e-mail. Is it bad that I want this?
  - csande17 7y ago
    Isn't that just a mailing list?
    - kickscondor 7y ago
      I guess I need to clarify. I don't want email summaries of blogs - that would be awful. I want websites to offer the ability to send raw RSS feeds over email as a push service. So basically WebSub but you don't need to run a WebSub server - you could just parse feeds using, for example, a procmail script. Email is already a well-supported protocol; WebSub is not.