• @electrodynamica
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    12 years ago

    RSS is kind of a shit protocol. They killed Aaron Swartz for trying to make it better. ActivityPub is a more modern version but the development of that protocol was also disproportionately influenced by in the wrong direction.

    • Bilb!
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      fedilink
      7
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      RSS is a format for data (often served over HTTPS), not a protocol. I don’t really understand comparing a data format to a federated communication protocol.

      • @electrodynamica
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        52 years ago

        ActivityPub is barely more than a format either. In fact, the things that are supposed to be protocol are completely disagreed about by all the major softwares, making it useless as a protocol anyway.

          • @electrodynamica
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            62 years ago

            If you are benchmarking, sure, it’s above par. But it had much more promise than that, and perhaps my mourning of it’s compromised potential comes off as dismissive. I was on the standards committee for it and researched decentralized social network protocols full time for many years, so it’s a bit personal for me. If only people knew just how much better things could be. I see it as a personal failure that I’m not better at communicating that vision.

        • @electrodynamica
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          4
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          It does have a few minor improvements. But that’s mostly just because it’s newer. It’s important to understand that the problems with RSS have nothing to do with it being XML. We should set and even demand a much higher bar.

          In data science, serialization matters very little.

          • link
            fedilink
            12 years ago

            I get that, but lets be real here: json is just easier to read and write than xml. Im not sure what problems @electrodynamica has with rss though, because it seems pretty solid.

      • @electrodynamica
        link
        22 years ago

        Only partly. He was opposed to many of the things that ultimately became it’s shortcomings.