It seems like you would want to support RSS, Atom, and ActivityPub to allow both news readers and newer things like Mastodon to work? Maybe RSS could be dropped? Are there news readers that support RSS but not Atom?
iTunes for podcasts.
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
#32I 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…
I've always felt that NAT ruined the internet. It made it basically improbable that someone might host something at home like the internet was made for.
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#33I'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
I wonder how that user feels about always being referenced in this context.
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#34I'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
Kind of true of all [new] technology though. Will it be a Betamax or a Blu Ray? I think the point of the article is trying to make the case that maybe you don't need the extra complexity of ActivityPub for your project.
Also, that user was completely right re: Dropbox, but they missed the market value of packaging all that for you in a few clicks install, on any platform with 99% uptime (also, I believe that user has noted in other threads they recognize their mistake in making the argument that Dropbox wasn't a value-add). On the other hand, it seems to my uneducated opinion on ActivityPub, that it is trading extra complexity for...push?
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#35I actually dream about bringing Atom (as far as I understand it's better than RSS but RSS just seems a better brand-name for this, in fact in many cases when you click on a link that says RSS you'll get Atom) back, expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments, implementing it better (auto-generated feeds on many sites are pretty crappy) and popularizing generic feed readers so non-geeks would be able to interact with others' self-hosted blogs (like my blog built on GitHub Pages) as easy and fun as it they do with Facebook, Instagram etc.
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#36I actually dream about bringing Atom (as far as I understand it's better than RSS but RSS just seems a better brand-name for this, in fact in many cases when you click on a link that says RSS you'll get Atom) back, expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments, implementing it better (auto-generated feeds on many sites are pretty crappy) and popularizing generic feed readers so non-geeks wou…
What you're describing sounds a lot like the indieweb movement. Worth checking out although they're getting significantly less momentum than activity-pub or any other number of protocol-first social networking projects.
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#37I'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
I wonder how that user feels about always being referenced in this context.
Five months ago:
> It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"!
> I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).
> Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#38I'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
That comment was true then and is even more true now. rsync, unison, and git over SSH provide a far superior solution for more use cases (many of which Dropbox cannot support) than Dropbox does, without any of Dropbox's risks to privacy.
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#39I actually dream about bringing Atom (as far as I understand it's better than RSS but RSS just seems a better brand-name for this, in fact in many cases when you click on a link that says RSS you'll get Atom) back, expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments, implementing it better (auto-generated feeds on many sites are pretty crappy) and popularizing generic feed readers so non-geeks wou…
> expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments
One of the problems I had with blog comments is spam. Blogger would queue up moderated comments and send you an email about them. The idea occurred to me that that was redundant and it would be better to cut out the middleman - you are getting email notifications about comments needing moderation, and email already had long established and much better spam filtering. Why not have people submit comments via email? That way you can also reply to people privately. This is also convenient for people who read their feeds via RSS-to-email or in newsreaders/email clients like Thunderbird and Gnus.
Another aspect of comments via email is that it is much more like a letter to the editor. Your blog posts are articles, and you can choose to update them with corrections and comments that people send in, instead of trying to manage a half-baked message board that is the standard LiveJournal/Blogger/Wordpress/Disqus comments section.
I think an easy and valuable way to get non-geeks to use web page feeds more is to provide the option to sign up for the feed via email, by offering a "newsletter" option.
Re: Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds
#40It seems like you would want to support RSS, Atom, and ActivityPub to allow both news readers and newer things like Mastodon to work? Maybe RSS could be dropped? Are there news readers that support RSS but not Atom?
> Maybe RSS could be dropped? Are there news readers that support RSS but not Atom?
Unfortunately yes. Gnus has not gotten Atom support yet (people keep using external programs to translate). Also far too many feeds still output RSS instead of Atom. RSS is a horrible format and there is no reason today to use it instead of Atom.