RSS > ACTIVITYPUB
2024-03-08
RSS is better than ActivityPub[footnote]I feel like this statement needs a few
clarifications and caveats, but my hot take looks spicier if I bury them in a
footnote!
* By RSS, I mean whichever pull-based basic HTTP you like, be that Atom, JSON
Feed, h-entry, or even just properly-marked-up HTML5: did you know that the
<article> element is intended to be suitable for syndication use?
* Obviously I appreciate that RSS and ActivityPub are different tools for
different jobs, and there are doubtless use-cases for which ActivityPub is
clearly the superior solution.
* I certainly don't object to services providing both RSS and ActivityPub as
syndication options, like Mastodon does, where both might be good choices.
[/footnote].
IMG Photograph of a boxing match, but with the heads of the competitors replaced with the ActivityPub and RSS logos (and "AP" or "RSS" written on their clothes, respectively). RSS is delivering a powerful uppercut to ActivityPub.
When I subscribe to content, I want:
* Resilient failsafes. ActivityPub has many points-of-failure. A notification
might fail to complete transmission as a result of downtime, faults, or
network conditions, and the receiving server might never know. A feed reader,
conversely, can tell you that an address 404'd or the server was down.
* Retroactive access. Once you fix the problem above... you still don't get
the message you missed: it's probably gone forever - there's no retroactive
access. The same is true when your ActivityPub server connects with a peer for
the first time: you only ever get new content after that point. RSS, on the
other hand, provides some number of "recent" items the moment you first
subscribe.
* Simple subscriptions. RSS can be served from a statically-hosted single
file, which makes it suitable to deploy anywhere as well as consume using
anything. It can be read, after a fashion, in anything from Lynx upwards.
RSS ticks all these boxes. If I can choose between RSS and ActivityPub to
subscribe to your content, and I don't need a real-time update, I'm probably
going to choose RSS.
About a month later, Matthias Pfefferle wrote a great post that makes a good
"next stop" if you're on a deep dive...
LINKS
HTML JSON Feed
HTML H-entry
HTML The <article> element is intended to be suitable for syndication use
HTML Subscription options for DanQ.me, which includes RSS and (via Mastodon) ActivityPub.
HTML Matthias Pfefferle wrote a great post that makes a good "next stop"