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Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

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Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#21

Post by nicoburns »

cjslep wrote: post #3

I feel need to address some points of the authors (I realize it's a hot take so it's meant to be biased): > But what does this buy us? For the most part it means that every piece of content everyone writes needs to be replicated to every point in the federation mesh to be useful. This is because ActivityPub is tied to RDF and linked data concepts. This isn't specific to ActivityPub, just a criticism of the linked dat…

For me, a key negative witb ActivityPub is the complexity. The RSS/Atom spec is pretty simple, and it fairly easy to see how it could be extended to allow for similar functionality. What are the disadvantages to an RSS based system?

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#22

Post by chipotle_coyote »

vorpalhex wrote: post #11

This reads pretty distinctly like "Get off my lawn you damned kids with your attempts at decentralization!". ActivityPub is a pretty new protocol and what it looks like in the wild is still evolving - but it's clear it's filling different voids then RSS. Sure, you could probably force most of these cases with some hacked up RSS implementation, and I can also use a longsword to mow my lawn. I'm personally very excited…

Well, an alternative reading of this is "maybe we can solve some of the same problems with IndieWeb principles instead of ActivityPub."

https://www.indieweb.org

These are not "hacked up RSS"; they're just RSS (well, more often Atom or JSON Feed) combined with other technologies like webmentions. These are all, like ActivityPub, IETF recommendations/standards. I've mentioned Micro.blog before, but it's worth mentioning again: it's a centralized server producing a Twitter-esque timeline, but the sources of posts might be individual blogs using any number of different blogging engines. When I post articles to my WordPress site, people can reply on Micro.blog and have those replies show up both in their timelines and as actual comments on my blog. (And in fact, behind the scenes, a "hosted" Micro.blog site is actually using all the same technologies, with Jekyll as the blog engine.)

As much as I like many things about Mastodon, I'm not convinced that it's a superior philosophy to Micro.blog's; the dark cloud to federation's silver lining is that the admins of any instance that your social graph connects to (that is, you follow someone on that instance and/or vice-versa) can break those connections without warning and with no recourse to you, beyond moving to another instance and hoping it doesn't happen again.

And, speaking more generally, I think the author definitely has some points that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand: it's possible that ActivityPub might indeed be better than other feed protocols at solving certain problems, but it's worth looking at each use case and asking if that's really true in this case. PeerTube might be one that ActivityPub excels at and that feeds don't, for instance. (I don't see anything about PeerTube's implementation that proves what it's doing with ActivityPub couldn't be done just as easily with, say, JSON Feed, but I haven't dug into that.)

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#23

Post by d2wa »

floatboth wrote: post #9

Forget RSS/atom, use microformats2 h-feed. https://indieweb.org/sidefile-antipattern And there is existing tech for the popular reply-like-repost UX for this, based on webmention.

There are less than 9000 websites that supply h-feed formatted data, and only four of the top 10 000 websites. https://publicwww.com/websites/%22h-feed%22/

h-feed haven’t been a massive success.

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#24

Post by d2wa »

floatboth wrote: post #9

Forget RSS/atom, use microformats2 h-feed. https://indieweb.org/sidefile-antipattern And there is existing tech for the popular reply-like-repost UX for this, based on webmention.

Are there any feed clients that support h-feed? I’m legitimately asking. I was looking for a h-feed capable client (like a traditional feed reader with h-feed support) only a few days ago and came up with none.

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#25

Post by smolder »

k__ wrote: post #7

I don't believe in federated solutions, but I'm also not sure if and when our end-user devices are ready for p2p.

P2P and self hosted stuff is what I want out of the internet, not SaaS style platforms. People's cable modems are almost always on so it's reasonable for them to have some almost-always-on services behind them, but circumstances make it difficult to build viable P2P tech:

- It's tough to monetize since true p2p software can just get pirated. You can't gatekeep to make sure people pay.

- The shortage of IPv4 with the help of buggy insecure operating systems made closed-to-the-outside NAT standard, making peers inaccessible without manual configuration or some helper technology.

- Data hungry government and corporations see independent communication channels as an obstacle to their goals. (See the recent story about five eyes pushing for backdoored crypto in Australia.)

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#26

Post by nine_k »

nicoburns wrote: post #21
cjslep wrote: post #3

I feel need to address some points of the authors (I realize it's a hot take so it's meant to be biased): > But what does this buy us? For the most part it means that every piece of content everyone writes needs to be replicated to every point in the federation mesh to be useful. This is because ActivityPub is tied to RDF and linked data concepts. This isn't specific to ActivityPub, just a criticism of the linked dat…

For me, a key negative witb ActivityPub is the complexity. The RSS/Atom spec is pretty simple, and it fairly easy to see how it could be extended to allow for similar functionality. What are the disadvantages to an RSS based system?

RSS is poorly specified, and cannot handle any feedback.

Atom is well-specified, and has provisions for feedback. But what user agents / popular libraries / whatever else actually uses the feedback (commenting) features? Which servers that serve Atom feeds support that, too, and how well?

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#27

Post by drb91 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #22
vorpalhex wrote: post #11

This reads pretty distinctly like "Get off my lawn you damned kids with your attempts at decentralization!". ActivityPub is a pretty new protocol and what it looks like in the wild is still evolving - but it's clear it's filling different voids then RSS. Sure, you could probably force most of these cases with some hacked up RSS implementation, and I can also use a longsword to mow my lawn. I'm personally very excited…

Well, an alternative reading of this is "maybe we can solve some of the same problems with IndieWeb principles instead of ActivityPub." https://www.indieweb.org These are not "hacked up RSS"; they're just RSS (well, more often Atom or JSON Feed) combined with other technologies like webmentions. These are all, like ActivityPub, IETF recommendations/standards. I've mentioned Micro.blog before, but it's worth mentionin…

I think the main draw of Mastadon is that it's an intentional experience, with blessed clients, discovery, etc etc. I'm unlikely to read anyone's blog if it's not put in front of me somehow. Furthermore, all I need to do to interact is install the client; I don't need my own site to do it.

Overall I think your argument is very strong if you can provide a comparable experience to mastadon. If not, then it's not clear why the benefits are worth it.

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#28

Post by berbec »

I'm not an ActivityPub user, but this post remindeds me of the initial comments to "Show HN: Dropbox" [1].

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#29

Post by chipotle_coyote »

drb91 wrote: post #27
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, an alternative reading of this is "maybe we can solve some of the same problems with IndieWeb principles instead of ActivityPub." https://www.indieweb.org These are not "hacked up RSS"; they're just RSS (well, more often Atom or JSON Feed) combined with other technologies like webmentions. These are all, like ActivityPub, IETF recommendations/standards. I've mentioned Micro.blog before, but it's worth mentionin…

I think the main draw of Mastadon is that it's an intentional experience, with blessed clients, discovery, etc etc. I'm unlikely to read anyone's blog if it's not put in front of me somehow. Furthermore, all I need to do to interact is install the client; I don't need my own site to do it. Overall I think your argument is very strong if you can provide a comparable experience to mastadon. If not, then it's not clear…

Micro.blog proves it's possible to provide a comparable experience--in some ways I prefer it, although that has much more to do with its aesthetics and nascent culture than any underlying technology. At any rate, if your blog is hosted on Mastodon itself, you don't even have to know it's a blog, per se--you can just use it exactly like Twitter.

The catch right now is that Micro.blog is a paid service. I don't see any reason why someone couldn't set up something very similar built on the same tech--other than, of course, the willingness to put in the time and money. :)

Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds

#30

Post by jeena »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #22
vorpalhex wrote: post #11

This reads pretty distinctly like "Get off my lawn you damned kids with your attempts at decentralization!". ActivityPub is a pretty new protocol and what it looks like in the wild is still evolving - but it's clear it's filling different voids then RSS. Sure, you could probably force most of these cases with some hacked up RSS implementation, and I can also use a longsword to mow my lawn. I'm personally very excited…

Well, an alternative reading of this is "maybe we can solve some of the same problems with IndieWeb principles instead of ActivityPub." https://www.indieweb.org These are not "hacked up RSS"; they're just RSS (well, more often Atom or JSON Feed) combined with other technologies like webmentions. These are all, like ActivityPub, IETF recommendations/standards. I've mentioned Micro.blog before, but it's worth mentionin…

The micro.blog way of doing it is really confusing, if I post something on my blog it shows up in micro.blog and then people can comment there and it shows up on my blog (in theory, in practice it never did for me, I never got a webmention from there), but now I want to answer on one of those comments and I have no idea how. If I do it as a comment post on my blog it never reaches those people from micro.blog, so the only way to do it is to externalize commenting to micro.blog and thus not being able to own my own content anymore, which is what micro.blog was advertising for all the time. Same with "likes", etc.
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