I know they’re quite different technically. But practically, what does ActivityPub unlock that was not previously possible with RSS and basic web tech stack?
I think I have an idea of the answer. RSS may provide a way for users to “subscribe” to content from a feed, equivalent of following and putting it in a unified feed.
But it does not have a way for users to interact with the poster, like comments or likes. This may be possible with a basic web stack though, but either users will have to make accounts on every person’s site, or the site has to accept no user auth. (but this could be resolved with a identity provider standard, like disqus does)
I suppose another thing activityPub does is distribute content to multiple servers. Not sure if this is really desirable though?
Anyways, did I miss anything?
Thanks for confirming! However my question is if that’s all, or if there’s more. I assume you mean that’s it.
Yep, that’s basically all of it. ActivityPub allows a reader to send messages back to the original poster. Those messages can be a comment, or a like, an upvote, a downvote, or a many others. That’s what ActivityPub unlocks compared to RSS.
RSS only goes one way: the reader can read messages from the poster, but not send any messages to the poster.
edit: if anyone is curious about what the “many other” messages can be, the list is here, under Verbs: https://github.com/activitystreams/activity-schema/blob/master/activity-schema.md#verbs
Technically, that is part of ActivityStreams, not ActivityPub. But there is a lot of overlap there, and ActivityStreams is a necessary addition. For example, downvotes on Lemmy are not part of AP, but you’ll find them in AS, called “dislike.”
Activitypub can include private messages
- If you don’t have a specific interest and/or lack the skill of finding new content that you like , RSS mostly won’t help you unless it has a " suggestion " feature , while on ActivityPub ( or any other social media ) you can find new content that might or might not suit you just by browsing
- RSS is read-only , ActivityPub is not
ActivityPub acts like two-way RSS
That’s most of it. ActivityPub also makes it possible to know who is subscribed. It’s very hard to count how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed.
Not really. They’re making requests, probably at least once a day. That makes it very easy to count active users. With subscribers, you can have a big number, but they’re not necessarily all active, and unless they’re on your instance, you can’t see how often they’re reading.
They’re making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or one user might have multiple IPs.
Deduplicate by IP/user-agent and you’ll get a pretty accurate count. Some people might be moving between wifi and data, but for the most part you can account for that. Same process as fingerprinting a browser.
