3 ms·

So even the well intentioned feed readers misbehave sometimes. I guess there is a spec but no proper test suite ever emerged? On the flip side should RSS becom

So even the well intentioned feed readers misbehave sometimes. I guess there is a spec but no proper test suite ever emerged? On the flip side should RSS become a thing again thus incentivizing bad actors what recourse is there? Or just from poorly written ones? Seems to be a missing piece. With torrenting there is either a tracker enforcing ratio or gossip between clients - so bad actors are quickly flushed out of the system. Maybe that's a fertile place to draw inspiration from. I'm not sure.

x0x0 2y ago
If I were betting, I'd bet many of the supposed bugs are readers working around incorrectly-implemented servers. If the feed doesn't update, but it's because of a server bug, your users are still left unhappy. In a perfect world the readers would note which servers are implemented correctly and which you can't trust last-updated / etags etc... that's a lot of work.
Gormo 2y ago
What do you mean by "become a thing again?" That seems to imply that RSS went away somehow, but this is very definitely not the case.
- ziggy_star 2y ago
  I mean a widespread popular mainstream thing like the glory days of Google Reader. We are very very far from the peak.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    I'm not sure it was ever a "widespread popular mainstream thing" -- most people never used Google Reader.
immibis 2y ago
There is no ratio gossip in torrents. I'm aware of "private trackers" which track per-user ratio, and of clients that will prioritize sending to peers they've received the most data from, and of "super seeding mode" where the client attempts to track whether each peer is spreading around the data it gets, and won't send data to peers that don't - the latter requires the super seeder to be the only seeder. There are no other mechanisms.
- ziggy_star 2y ago
  I wrote ratio or gossip. Sorry it wasn't clear. The private trackers not only keep score of per-user ratio but also have a shortlist of whitelisted torrent clients that are conformant. So you can't easily cheat. The downsides are obvious. There is super seeder as you describe in an attempt to be decentralized/trackerless. Right? Additionally, at least I was under the impression, inherit to the protocol itself is not so much the keeping it fair but rather multicasting the least shared chunks as optimally as possible across the swarm. All of that is to say that a user agent misbehaving, maliciously or otherwise, will have a hard time. Trust but verify. Whereas RSS appears to just.. trust. It is a more idealistic protocol from a more naive time period of the web. And I argue lacking in some sort of mechanism vaguely along those lines. Torrents came out around the same time but sort of evolved and refined these things.

x0x0 2y ago

If I were betting, I'd bet many of the supposed bugs are readers working around incorrectly-implemented servers. If the feed doesn't update, but it's because of a server bug, your users are still left unhappy. In a perfect world the readers would note which servers are implemented correctly and which you can't trust last-updated / etags etc... that's a lot of work.

Gormo 2y ago

What do you mean by "become a thing again?" That seems to imply that RSS went away somehow, but this is very definitely not the case.

ziggy_star 2y ago
I mean a widespread popular mainstream thing like the glory days of Google Reader. We are very very far from the peak.
- Gormo 2y ago
  I'm not sure it was ever a "widespread popular mainstream thing" -- most people never used Google Reader.

immibis 2y ago

There is no ratio gossip in torrents. I'm aware of "private trackers" which track per-user ratio, and of clients that will prioritize sending to peers they've received the most data from, and of "super seeding mode" where the client attempts to track whether each peer is spreading around the data it gets, and won't send data to peers that don't - the latter requires the super seeder to be the only seeder. There are no other mechanisms.

ziggy_star 2y ago
I wrote ratio or gossip. Sorry it wasn't clear. The private trackers not only keep score of per-user ratio but also have a shortlist of whitelisted torrent clients that are conformant. So you can't easily cheat. The downsides are obvious. There is super seeder as you describe in an attempt to be decentralized/trackerless. Right? Additionally, at least I was under the impression, inherit to the protocol itself is not so much the keeping it fair but rather multicasting the least shared chunks as optimally as possible across the swarm. All of that is to say that a user agent misbehaving, maliciously or otherwise, will have a hard time. Trust but verify. Whereas RSS appears to just.. trust. It is a more idealistic protocol from a more naive time period of the web. And I argue lacking in some sort of mechanism vaguely along those lines. Torrents came out around the same time but sort of evolved and refined these things.