Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

If you try Pleroma, do yourself a favor and also install the Soapbox-FE frontend. Much cleaner, customizable and familiar to Twitter users than the default one.

Regarding the backend. It does seem that Mastodon was the first one and has more functionality, but (1) Pleroma is catching up and (2) waaaaay lighter on resources. Mastodon is built on Rails, requires PostgreSQL, Redis, a task server (sidekiq) and optionally Elasticsearch. Pleroma goes by with just PostgreSQL and is built on Elixir.

Regardless of technology, what I'd really like to see in a future version of these AP-systems is the ability to manage multiple-domains with a single database / application server. Right now all implementations assume that the domain of the backend is the domain of every user in the instance. So this means that if I want to host Mastodon for a user with a custom domain, I'll have to spin a instance/database just for this user. If I could have a separate mapping between account / domain, one single instance could manage everyone.

>It does seem that Mastodon was the first one and has more functionality

Pleroma has rich text support, emoji reacts, polls with more than 4 answers... It never struck me as having less features than Mastodon, except maybe when it hadn't gotten polls yet at all some months back.

Don't forget the chat system, soon to be released :)

ChatMessages info here: https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/merge_requests/...

https://soapbox.pub for the lazy.

I was thinking of using a fediverse instance for my blog but I am unsure whether it's a good idea.

What do you mean? To use a Mastodon/Pleroma instead of the blog, or a blog engine that can interoperate with ActivityPub? If the latter, I can only think of https://write.as for the moment.

You can also install this plugin for WordPress:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

The ActivityPub ecosystem is pretty interesting. Look at it closely.

There are a whole bunch of others. See https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

I run my blog (https://wrt.nth.io/luke/) as a fediverse instance of writefreely. Here’s my ansible role for it. You should just give it a try and see if it’s for you: https://src.nth.io/ansible-roles/file/tip/writefreely

I think federated blogs are the answer to google killing rss.

RSS is still not dead! You are on a website, RIGHT NOW, that publishes fully operational RSS feeds! So do all the popular blog CMSes! So do all the popular static blog generators!

Even your own blog that you just linked publishes working RSS! https://wrt.nth.io/luke/feed/

The replacement for RSS is to stop inexplicably thinking RSS is somehow gone.

I just mean rss is not nearly what it was at it’s peak. Sites are still publishing RSS feeds to be sure though.

I'm not sure that there's any "peak" to compare it to. I mean, my whole wishlist for the RSS ecosystem is basically:

1) people stop inexplicably calling it "dead"

Being "dead" has its fringe benefits, at least, like no one proposing changes for the sake of change - it gets to be happily frozen and useful with no one trying to e.g. update it from the XML-everything mania of its time (embarassing in hindsight) to the JSON-everything mania of our time (I'm worried there won't even be a hindsight for it to be embarassing in).

Well, except when people propose to replace it with something else because it's "dead" (sorry, I have no interest in following anyone on activitypub - if I want updates from your blog, I will poll the RSS feed you have kindly provided).

I've never really used rss as a power user, but a long time ago subscribed to some feeds and tracked them in an rss app. I did that because it seemed like at one point I saw the rss logo everywhere and it seemed like everyone was promoting it. I didn't use the actual aggregator to look at the combined feeds, but I did have it all set up.

Now I can't remember the last time I saw a site promoting or even clearly mentioning above the fold that they publish an rss feed. I didn't know HN published one until now.

That's why I haven't argued with anyone claiming it's dead. It seems like it disappeared.

I've seen more than a few sites use the RSS logo to point to a newsletter signup. I'm not sure whether it was deception or ignorance.

JSON you say?

https://jsonfeed.org/

I wish I were a farmer.

RSS's (and Atom's) problem is not using XML, it's the woeful ly vague, and overly forgiving specification.

As someone who has written a parser library and a RSS reader program, I can tell you that it is an endless battle of users always reporting yet another feed that is "breaking your RSS reader".

When investigating why the feed does not work well, you always end up finding yet another way how a site can implement RSS/Atom badly while still following the letter of the specification.

I love the idea of RSS/Atom and the possibilities they allow, but hate the actual specs.

Yes, they are not very good specs, but frozen bad (cf. Unix) has benefits.

I don’t feel it’s fair to say that about Atom. RSS, sure; it’s a total disaster. And that’s kinda why Atom was made, and it seems to me to do a good job.

So given that, any chance you could elucidate on fault you find with Atom?

Yes, you are right, most of my grievances were against RSS - either old RDF, or RSS 2.0, or perhaps against Atom 0.3, which was not all that common before much better Atom 1.0 took over.

Still, I vaguely recall that there was at least one vagueness in the Atom 1.0 spec that I found abused in a real world feed, but can't for the life of me remember it - it's been a while.

Now if only podcast players would catch up to 2007 and support Atom.

As anecdotal as this is, take it with a grain of salt: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss

2 weeks after you posted these comments, your enthusiasm for RSS got me back into it. I set up a self hosted RSS reader and I've been happily re-engaging with long form content. Getting long form content in my fediverse feed is definitely not the same (though it's nice!). Thanks for the comments!

I personally use Feedly as my RSS reader and I followed my blog to see how many followers I get. Currently, I have 367 Feedly subscribers and it still continues to grow. Also, looking at my analytics, I can see people coming in from Feedly, so it shows that they are definitely active subs[0].

[0] https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fmicha...

It's easy to convince a growing number of people of RSS's value: "If you listen to podcasts, you probably already use RSS."

Then you just expand on the options and uses to someone who's already favorable toward RSS because it was so painless to use they didn't even realize they used it to follow some of their favorite people.

Every pleroma user is an atom feed. Soon every hash tag will be too.

I didn't know HN had an official RSS feed available. Where is it located, I've never managed to find it?

We're also working on making it easier to install and switch between frontends.

Looks like Soapbox’s built on React unlike the default front-end built on Vue

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