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> In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years.

> In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. This is an often-repeated myth. I have a lot of experience with XMPP, and I can tell you that many of today's clients are unrecognisable compared to equivalents 20 years ago. Then IRCv3 is a thing in multiple IRC clients and networks. RSS, well, I'm not sure how much evolution is needed there anyhow. By longevity, the most successful networks have all been open ones. The proprietary ones come and go.

PaulHoule 2y ago
What I have seen with XMPP is major uptake with law enforcement and military. Lots of custom systems there. RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use. Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out. It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in. I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely. I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude. There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.

PaulHoule 2y ago

What I have seen with XMPP is major uptake with law enforcement and military. Lots of custom systems there. RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use. Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out. It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in. I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely. I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude. There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.