68
What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't?
(lemy.lol)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
68 points (87.0% liked)
Fediverse
28503 readers
115 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
From what I see, ActivityPub doesn't seem to solve the problem of sorting or prioritizing content. In fact, I believe RSS wins here, because it is easier to do this on the client side with RSS, as it is assumed the client has all the content from the RSS feed without any biased order, whereas with activity pub, it varies by provider and instance.
Sorting and filtering can be done well on the client side, and the plus side is the user can have a ton of choice here. It just so happens that our algorithms for that in the open source world are no match for the addiction-inducing ones of Twitter and others.
You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.
That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.
I fully agree with you, but I think this isn't because RSS clients can't do this from a technical perspective. I suppose most RSS clients come from people with anti algorithm sentiment, but realistically, a RSS client has all what it needs to implement basic or advanced sorting and filtering.
But I agree with you that most rss readers out there have that problem.
I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There's no reason someone couldn't write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.