From my point of view, social media, in the name “social” brings the active interaction between the members. I don’t see that ascpect well covered in this post.
Exactly. And if you need to extend the RSS vocabulary with things to make it interactive, then I guess it’s better to use a protocol that’s been specifically created for that like ActivityPub. :D
Or re-use the ActivityStreams vocabulary over any protocol. ActivityPub is a HTTP based publish-subscribe protocol that sends around ActivityStreams. But there’s no reason why ActivityStreams should only be sent over ActivityPub.
In fact, a previous version of ActivityStreams was designed to be used over Atom (Atom Activity Streams 1.0).
It would be sweet to have a page + RSS feed on my website that contained all my comments from Hacker News, Reddit, Mastodon, Twitter*, and of course Discourse.
Distributing torrents and location-independent URIs with RSS/Atom is also best-practice for piracy. Private trackers usually have feeds for announcing when new torrents are indexed.
Are there protocols which have tackled head on the push vs pull issue? Push suffers from the fanout problem (ActivityPub), pull suffers from constant polling (RSS). Is there a hybrid?
IMO something like a Signaling Server is needed. If I start a node, I make my presence known there and whenever there’s an update, I could push some metadata about it. Timestamp, topics, whatever. That server could be optimized for constant polling and enable deliberate polls from other nodes.
One thing that I think is key, and the core of the reader I am working on is the ability to curate. For me this is the main purpose of social interactions on information platforms. If I read through the entire feed of someone who posts a lot of information, I should be able to pick out and republish the things that I think are interesting or relevant for my friends/family/colleagues/followers etc. That way everyone can feel confident that those feeds are covered and nothing is being ignored, without replicating the work of reading through them for every person in the group.
For me the main problem with all major social media systems is this work duplication. To really participate fully you have to scroll and skimread through kilometers of text every day. I feel like I have better things I could be doing given the negligible benefit I get from these platforms. With effective curation we should be able to make everything vastly more time efficient.
From my point of view, social media, in the name “social” brings the active interaction between the members. I don’t see that ascpect well covered in this post.
Exactly. And if you need to extend the RSS vocabulary with things to make it interactive, then I guess it’s better to use a protocol that’s been specifically created for that like ActivityPub. :D
Or OStatus which is exactly this.
Or re-use the ActivityStreams vocabulary over any protocol. ActivityPub is a HTTP based publish-subscribe protocol that sends around ActivityStreams. But there’s no reason why ActivityStreams should only be sent over ActivityPub.
In fact, a previous version of ActivityStreams was designed to be used over Atom (Atom Activity Streams 1.0).
That’s an interesting bit of internet history. Thank you for the link.
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
Distributing torrents and location-independent URIs with RSS/Atom is also best-practice for piracy. Private trackers usually have feeds for announcing when new torrents are indexed.
Are there protocols which have tackled head on the push vs pull issue? Push suffers from the fanout problem (ActivityPub), pull suffers from constant polling (RSS). Is there a hybrid?
IMO something like a Signaling Server is needed. If I start a node, I make my presence known there and whenever there’s an update, I could push some metadata about it. Timestamp, topics, whatever. That server could be optimized for constant polling and enable deliberate polls from other nodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
A few people seem to be looking at RSS again for social communication. I remember this was posted a while back.
One thing that I think is key, and the core of the reader I am working on is the ability to curate. For me this is the main purpose of social interactions on information platforms. If I read through the entire feed of someone who posts a lot of information, I should be able to pick out and republish the things that I think are interesting or relevant for my friends/family/colleagues/followers etc. That way everyone can feel confident that those feeds are covered and nothing is being ignored, without replicating the work of reading through them for every person in the group.
For me the main problem with all major social media systems is this work duplication. To really participate fully you have to scroll and skimread through kilometers of text every day. I feel like I have better things I could be doing given the negligible benefit I get from these platforms. With effective curation we should be able to make everything vastly more time efficient.