Fediverse

28248 readers

721 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? (lemy.lol)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

One more difference is that RSS is polling based, meaning that subscribers have to actively ask every hour or so if thre is new content.

On the other hand, ActivityPub knows who is subscribed and can actively distribute new content to other servers who can in turn send push messages to their users, letting you know about new content within seconds.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So activityPub uses push architecture to push to other servers / instances, but it doesn't push to users does it? I would imagine from instance to user, it is still pull based.

So effectively it's a load distributer thing, I suppose, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

As far as I know, ActivityPub only applies to server to server communication. Still, many applications that implement ActivityPub (for example Mastodon) do use push notifications for their clients.