I am still not super sold on the ActivityPub format as being better than RSS, any dissenters want to change my mind?
In AP you don't need to follow anyone to have messages for you delivered directly to your inbox.
You have to check other servers if you're interested in messages to others but I guess there is no analog to that for email.
Of course if you’re thinking in terms of “broadcast internet” with a Facebook at its center you may be correct
So basically WebSub but you don't need to run a WebSub server - you could just parse feeds using, for example, a procmail script. Email is already a well-supported protocol; WebSub is not.
A lot of email clients also have support inbuilt. (Thunderbird, Outlook, and others).
The system works quite well, and I can read my RSS both via a client-side app (thunderbird in my case) and on the go via the webmail. I even made a small modification to rss2email to automatically "tag" the mails so I can use mail filters to automatically sorts the feeds into different folders.
I have a server that fetches the RSS content a few times a day, but I guess it could also work "locally", for example by doing it once each time I turn on my computer (if you are okay with "missing out" sometimes on very active feeds).
I decided to do the switch when I noted that the interfaces of my email client and of my RSS reader were basically indistinguishable.
EDIT: for the anecdote, this project was initially created by the very same Aaron Swartz that, among other things, contributed to the creation of the RSS format http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001148
There is still a difference between cache and what's on hard disk.
(My blog's currently down due to too much unrelated tinkering).
ActivityPub is still experimental, and you may not even need it.
My blog's content is natively shown inline with other content on Pleroma. To a Pleroma user, it and responses seem like all other native posts and interactions. They can click its ID to go through to my original blog. There, everyone sees my blog and its style, as well as the same responses as native comments. Back on Pleroma, those users can boost it and share it with others (their followers). Virality achieved. No further engineering needed from me to enable that.
That's federated social networking. Imagine writing a YouTube comment from Twitter's interface and your Twitter account. In this case, my blog's content -- not just links -- natively pops up in followers' feeds when I publish something. And since ActivityPub is built on and compatible with RDF, this could be extended to all sorts of domains and interactions.
Oh good, I'm not the only one with a broken blog:) I discovered recently that while my blog is up, I didn't have source files that would generate the site as it exists on the server. Nice to know other people have similar things going on:)
I am probably underestimating the complexity of the problem, but I have a feeling that this is a "I hacked this together in an hour and it works a lot better than expected" type of problem.