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
       
 (HTM) JSON Feed
 (HTM) H-entry
 (HTM) The <article> element is intended to be suitable for syndication use
 (HTM) Subscription options for DanQ.me, which includes RSS and (via Mastodon) ActivityPub.
 (HTM) Matthias Pfefferle wrote a great post that makes a good "next stop"