Discussion
Re the brouhaha with activitypub and atproto.
They should fully embrace inbound and outbound RSS and be done with it.
In the end if they want to interop, that’s how it’ll happen.
However I don’t think either of them wants interop.
I’ve seen this movie before.
This is where I saw it --
Apparently the statement there was taken down and put somewhere else.
Seems there was a conference about it, and then an extensive discussion.
So, the brouhaha you're talking about is about Emelia's letter?
The letter starts like this:
"Recently there has been a lot of discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol which has been quite dividing and heated."
I thought you were talking about that.
i'm not a big fan of "conversation" -- a lot of spam and more than a bit of abuse.
the conversations is what makes moderation necessary.
i have a different plan. you can send me a response and if i want it on my site, one click and it's there, otherwise only i read it.
removes the incentive for spam.
That’s exactly what it should be, and btw that’s what atproto should be too, and if they were based on RSS, a common format, interop would be much easier.
But only if they want interop. Very often they want to say they’re “open” without giving up their power.
Who cares if they’re polite to each other, nothing they do matters. Their way leads us to more bulkshit.
A lot of the interesting points of ActivityPub come from it's "User -> Verbs -> Thing" that I don't think that could be mapped on top of RSS.
In my opinion, how you list, or fetch the content generated by a user is the least interesting part of ActivityPub, and frankly the easiest to solve if anyone thinks to support both it and ATProto PDS.
That’s where you start. And once that is established, you use the resulting system and see what you want to go next. That’s how you do a bootstrap.
Also RSS supports a lot of stuff that neither of the other protocols do, like all the features of the web.
Honestly both groups have a lot of nerve calling what they do the web when they don’t even support LINKING, the most important feature of the web.
The arrogance and deceit are breathtaking.
ActivityPub is built upon objects being dereferenceable through their IDs which are theoretically immutable URLs. Or, I misunderstand what you mean by "LINKING".
Client to server collection addressing of ActivityPub objects is basically fulfilling the same function of RSS with the difference of using JSON as an encapsulation method instead of XML.
Maybe your problem is with specific implementations of C2S - which I'll be the first to admit - in majority, follow the Mastodon lead, and are severely lacking. However the specification itself should cover all that RSS/Atom offer and more.
You don’t know what linking is on the web?
Unbelievable.
Stop everything and do some reading about the web.
i use automattic's bridge to activitypub, so i don't have to worry about the innards.
but i like the way the web works better.
that's what i'm going to stick with.
@davew I don't know who you mean by "any of you", but I can assure you that I'm really glad we have interoperability with so many different platforms. It's great that we have native implementations of ActivityPub in over 100 different codebases, but I also love Bridgy Fed, so I can follow my friends and family who are on Bluesky. We are interconnected.
@davew Dave, we *did* start with RSS and HTTP. It evolved over the years, becoming Activity Streams Atom (and Activity Streams RSS!), then Activity Streams JSON and finally Activity Streams 2.0. If you look closely at the AP protocol, it's just feeds enhanced with extra fields for social data with a push mechanism, like PubSubHubbub or RSSCloud.
https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implement-activitypub-in-a-static-site-or-any-website-part-2/
The only sticking point left is how to make the inbox part easier for people so they can get "pingbacks"?
also saw a post from paul frazee about a year ago saying they thought about using HTTP and RSS but decided instead to reinvent the whole stack.
the process is so obvious. start with really good RSS support in and out and then start adding features after living with it for a year or so.
we could stop talking about interop and start using it.
i don't think any of you really want interop. you could have it very very very quickly.
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