Live data from Hacker News

Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

pfrazee.hashbase.io

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#21

"Unlike Twitter and the other social networks, RSS never tried to capture the social graph, likes, comments, annotations, retweets, and etc of its userbase." Except when they do, of course. Some places still have comment feeds. Still, it's an interesting idea.

Yeah I knew there had been some shots at it, but my google fu couldn't pull up anything solid to point to. I'd love to see if somebody ever tried to "go big" with RSS. EDIT: also the comments RSS is generally comments posted to the blog, right? Not quite the same thing as each user having their own RSS feed with their posts and comments.

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#22
post #21

"Unlike Twitter and the other social networks, RSS never tried to capture the social graph, likes, comments, annotations, retweets, and etc of its userbase." Except when they do, of course. Some places still have comment feeds. Still, it's an interesting idea.

Yeah I knew there had been some shots at it, but my google fu couldn't pull up anything solid to point to. I'd love to see if somebody ever tried to "go big" with RSS. EDIT: also the comments RSS is generally comments posted to the blog, right? Not quite the same thing as each user having their own RSS feed with their posts and comments.

The Indieweb captures these things in HTML microformats. I can see why you'd want to go with JSON, though - it's simpler to parse.

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#23
Anyone who tries to use JSON for complex, extensible formats that involve documents (as opposed to data structures), metadata and semantic data are shooting themselves and their users in the foot. Just because W3C fucked up in some of their XML-based standards doesn't mean that trying to shove JSON everywhere is a sensible idea.

  {
  "topic": "dat://unwalled.garden",
  "body": "Why didn't you use XML!?",
  "createdAt": "2018-12-07T04:15:44.722Z"
  }
Now, I want to change body to include images or something of that sort. Bam, all the software that parses the old format is now broken.

Just use XML. Preferably, extend one of the existing RSS-like formats. Apply lessons learned from HTML and XHTML. It will work zillion times better in the long run.

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#24
post #23

Anyone who tries to use JSON for complex, extensible formats that involve documents (as opposed to data structures), metadata and semantic data are shooting themselves and their users in the foot. Just because W3C fucked up in some of their XML-based standards doesn't mean that trying to shove JSON everywhere is a sensible idea. { "topic": "dat://unwalled.garden", "body": "Why didn't you use XML!?", "createdAt": "201…

There's nothing stopping you from extending the JSON schema. We'll probably come up with extension points to make it easier (as subobjects, each declaring their own schema IDs).

The format really isn't the interesting question. The interesting question is how do we get clients to behave predictably with each other. If you start breaking the schemas that everyone on the network is using, then yes your posts should fail to render and probably be ignored.

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#25
post #23

Anyone who tries to use JSON for complex, extensible formats that involve documents (as opposed to data structures), metadata and semantic data are shooting themselves and their users in the foot. Just because W3C fucked up in some of their XML-based standards doesn't mean that trying to shove JSON everywhere is a sensible idea. { "topic": "dat://unwalled.garden", "body": "Why didn't you use XML!?", "createdAt": "201…

I don't follow you. JSON is very extensible. Just add a new key like "body-image" and you're done.

How is that different from XML if your body is defined as a text field?

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#26
>Unlike Twitter and the other social networks, RSS never tried to capture the social graph, likes, comments, annotations, retweets, and etc of its userbase. It limited itself to posted content (mostly blog posts) and that was a missed opportunity.

>missed opportunity

Maybe it's just me, but RSS being all about content is the best thing about it.

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#27
post #25
post #23

Anyone who tries to use JSON for complex, extensible formats that involve documents (as opposed to data structures), metadata and semantic data are shooting themselves and their users in the foot. Just because W3C fucked up in some of their XML-based standards doesn't mean that trying to shove JSON everywhere is a sensible idea. { "topic": "dat://unwalled.garden", "body": "Why didn't you use XML!?", "createdAt": "201…

I don't follow you. JSON is very extensible. Just add a new key like "body-image" and you're done. How is that different from XML if your body is defined as a text field?

How do you express "Why didn't you use XML!?" with json?

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#28
post #23

Anyone who tries to use JSON for complex, extensible formats that involve documents (as opposed to data structures), metadata and semantic data are shooting themselves and their users in the foot. Just because W3C fucked up in some of their XML-based standards doesn't mean that trying to shove JSON everywhere is a sensible idea. { "topic": "dat://unwalled.garden", "body": "Why didn't you use XML!?", "createdAt": "201…

can you explain that example more clearly?

if you wanted to "include images or something of that sort" you would add an "images" key or a "something of that sort" key

in your particular example, body can clearly take image links image data as string and the parser can deal with it.

in my projects we typically would have a nosql database which out the box allows it to be indifferent about objects in a collection/table that include or exclude certain keys

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#29
post #27
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow you. JSON is very extensible. Just add a new key like "body-image" and you're done. How is that different from XML if your body is defined as a text field?

How do you express "Why didn't you use XML!?" with json?

you don't, you just store the string as is in the body tag and let the client side parser know how to parse html strings that may also include an image tag

what is the argument here? why didn't you know you answered your own question

"body":"Why didn't you use XML!?"

Re: Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps

#30

https://activitypub.rocks/

Every existing ActivityPub application requires you to rely on a server operated by someone else that controls your identity. This application puts you fundamentally in control of your content: it is just served from your own device by default, with the option to have another server pin your content (all of your content has Dat addresses). Also, this sort of "use this, not that" dismissal ignores the fact that almost…

Okay, but why RSS over Activity Streams?
Post reply on HN