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Comment by joshuanapoli | Hacker News Reader

Why is ActivityPub better than RSS?

RSS is a loosely specified document format with many implementation variants that basically represent a list of items with links, titles and a few other fields.

ActivityPub is a W3C protocol and API specification for basically a generic federated social network with client server, and server to server API calls to create and manage activities and activity streams (a related specification).`

It's not about being 'better' but about being something different. Representing an activity feed as an RSS feed is easy. Mastodon in fact has support for RSS. So, you don't even need to use mastodon to follow mastodon users and their micro blogs. For example, this is how you get Neil Gaiman's RSS feed

  curl -H 'Accept: application/rss+xml' https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself

It's not really comparable, because ActivityPub describes a two way communication channel between entities, while RSS is just one way.

ActivityPub is similar/comparable to email but built for social networks interactions.

ActivityPub is built for events. It's way more general than email.

You can push whatever you want over email. I have used email as a federated queueing system... It worked fine.

I'd be very curious what gave you this idea. The ActivityPub vocabulary contains a number of social network related activities that can operate over a decently large vocabulary of object types, events being only one of them.

You're confusing "an event Im going to" with "an event signaled by a program"

Thank you for clarifying that. I would hope that I can be forgiven for not understanding what you meant seeing how stingy you are with your words. Even so, I can't say I've heard anyone that works on ActivityPub projects call "Activities" events.

So it's Trackbacks all over again ;P

Yes

they're fundamentally different things. Activitypub is a protocol for multidirectional sharing of content, RSS is for unidirectional publisher/consumer distribution. there's no reason an ActivityPub instance couldn't also provide RSS feeds of their content.

Which they usually do! Now if only you could also follow arbitrary RSS feeds...

I built this: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/. It posts RSS entries to a given account, and that account can now be subscribed to, entries can be commented, etc... It works well for one or two feeds but can get tedious if you want to follow many feeds and not spend too much time on that.

There is also https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub. It requires a bit more work to maintain, but the creation and management of feeds is way more straightforward.

> there's no reason an ActivityPub instance couldn't also provide RSS feeds of their content.

it already does. you can receive users mastodon posts/comments as rss already—just add .rss after their address.

the number of esoteric things mastodon and activity pub support is wild. honestly i think it’s gonna change the entire paradigm.

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