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Comment by PretzelFisch | Hacker News Reader

I guess I don't understand why so much effort is put into these federated social networks rather then starting with a blog and rss perspective to build the same kind of network.

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RSS was/is a good idea, but it wasn't implemented by browsers that well. I actually think the rise of social networks like Facebook/Twitter were partly due to RSS's usability issues, given that they provided users with functionality similar to RSS's but with much less technical terms. "Following" someone is an easier to understand idea than "click to use my RSS link into your feed reader".

I'd like things to go in this direction as well, but with slightly different tech than rss. What you really want is the notification layer of social networks as a standard, so that ppl who follow you are merely alerted that they should visit your site. RSS can be used for this of course, but it's really meant for content syndication rather than as a notification transport layer

You're describing ActivityPub, which is a W3C recommendation[0], which happens to be what Mastodon uses. At least one blogging platform is set up to interact with the fediverse[1]. Hopefully many more one day.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ [1] https://discuss.write.as/t/activitypub-support/64

Plume is a WIP, and has been discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17411173

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