Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related or responsive to another RSS item?
(Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)
(Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)
One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think.
There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds.
> But that started with a privacy scandal
What was the privacy scandal?
> The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?
But blog post comments is completely another medium from Twitter. It requires you to sign in and, since comment will be there forever, you usually put more effort in it. So comments are more rare and of higher quality. But at the same time you could sign in as anonymous and put your spam link or some ego bullshit -- which frequently happen on popular sites. So it's very dependent from community.
And if you comment on some blog post only readers of this post will see (and they will know the context). When you comment on Twitter -- anybody could see. Together with 280 character limit this leads to completely different kind of discussion.
Let RSS be good at one-way consumption and ActivityPub be good at bi-directional communication.