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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get the feeling that it’s working pretty well
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.
oh :/
This is where I’m advocating a lot. Btw, I took note on major challenges to overcome to be able to go much further than where we are now (and not slide backwards either). See: https://discuss.coding.social/t/major-challenges-for-the-fediverse/67
The majority of these challenges relate to social issues, btw. Or sociotechnical, if you will.
Yep, and if you wanted a better data format for feeds, checkout json feed: https://jsonfeed.org
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.
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.
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Only partly. He was opposed to many of the things that ultimately became it’s shortcomings.