Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay.
Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on my blog in response to this post of yours".
Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's page as "comments".
This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to that has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a very centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it's like $15 a year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on cheap hosting.
In February of 2024, Automattic announced that it would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI.[27]
27: https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-d...
"Announced" may be too strong; the link is to an internal email leak discussing this possibility, but "Automattic may be experimenting with selling data to midjourney/openai" is still pretty close to "Automattic's selling user data". Hell, I can see the positive spin blog post announcing this: "They're also giving Automattic a bunch of free cycles on improving Askimet's spam/ham filters, in exchange for a look at every other comment anyone is sending through Askimet ever. We're aware this is a thorny ethical issue; click HERE for the archives of our mailing list dedicated to this project."
As for Palantir, my inner paranoid says that if the FBI/NSA/etc wants this data, they have some way of getting whether or not a deal with a public front like Palantir is involved.
All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?)
With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined strategy to keep synced.
WebSub can help with solving the poll rate issue, but that presumably wouldn't solve the problem for consumers that are offline for a while.
Makes it a ton easier to parse. Cheers!
And yes, I do realise that such services will tend to not be really decentralised (similar to the relationship of websites and search engines). But that means the downside is not that you don't get such discovery, but that you'll be reliant on more centralised services for such discovery, whereas in the fediverse you would be less reliant on such services for finding out who has commented on your post (though it will, as you've mentioned still not be enough).
Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS feeds on the internet that satisfy a certain criteria, like publishing a hashtag or responding to a particular post, is a problem that can actually be solved in a principled way, because a fundamental limitation of the pull methodology is that you have to know the list of places you are checking beforehand, you can't get content from somewhere you didn't know about prior. The only way to solve this would be to have some kind of crawling and indexing system that regularly crawls the entire internet looking for these expanded RSS feeds and then categorized them according to various criteria in order to poll them. And that is both a very high technical investment and has a lot of limitations itself. So in the end it seems like you haven't really actually distributed the work of a social media system more equally after all, you've just inverted who is doing the work, going from a Federated set of servers that do all the work pushing content everywhere to a Federated set of servers that do all the work pulling content from places.
Otherwise everything gets taken over by AI and bots and psychopaths and propagandists and turns to shit.