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by Hamuko 1085 days ago
I still don't understand the point of ActivityPub. Everyone one wants every social media, blog, news site to implement it. Why? RSS already exists to aggregate all of those into a single place. And having interacted with infosec.exchange, I came to the conclusion that long-form content doesn't mix well with microblogging and that Mastodon is a shit interface for it. I have a completely different software for my RSS feeds with a completely different way of browsing through content that works well for it.
2 comments
vidarh 1085 days ago
RSS is one way, ActivityPub two. If your blog makes articles available to ActivityPub, then people can e.g. comment directly on the blog post without having to post a link to it, and others can follow those posts.

If you don't like Mastodon, there's Pleroma, Misskey, Calkey and others, as well as apps, or you can find RSS feeds from them if you just want to read, or you can use one of the alternate web frontends.

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Hamuko 1084 days ago
Mastodon RSS feeds are also crap. None of the posts have any kind of a header, so it's not possible to see what the post is about without opening the post. Real blogs will actually have titles that describe their contents.
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vidarh 1084 days ago
Mastodon isn't a blog platform, so that is unsurprising.
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ttepasse 1084 days ago
ActivityPub has its deep origins in the feeds world.

Originally people were extending feeds with the Atom ActivityStreams Extensions, in XML, for richer data structures which contain the social activities of persons. The protocol PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) was used for some realtime updating of feed subscribers (Push-then-pull, instead of Pull). Mapping persons or rather their accounts to resources like feeds was the impetus for WebFinger. And for notifying comments or reactions to upstream feed producers there was the Salmon protocol. Together those formats and protocols morphed into the OStatus protocol.

With the rise of JSON and with lessons learned from OStatus and pump.io those specs morphed into ActivityPub today. The underlying ActivityStreams vocabulary is still the same, I think, but the mechanism for following and responding now uses dedicated out- and inboxes.

I think microblogging and other social network stuff and long-form blog posts are different content, best consumed differently. There is some overlap, of course, but articles do not need shoehorned in. Sometimes people simply undervalue the simple link from a microblog post to the longform article.

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