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"