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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? (lemy.lol)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I know they're quite different technically. But practically, what does ActivityPub unlock that was not previously possible with RSS and basic web tech stack?

I think I have an idea of the answer. RSS may provide a way for users to "subscribe" to content from a feed, equivalent of following and putting it in a unified feed.

But it does not have a way for users to interact with the poster, like comments or likes. This may be possible with a basic web stack though, but either users will have to make accounts on every person's site, or the site has to accept no user auth. (but this could be resolved with a identity provider standard, like disqus does)

I suppose another thing activityPub does is distribute content to multiple servers. Not sure if this is really desirable though?

Anyways, did I miss anything?

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago (4 children)

But it does not have a way for users to interact with the poster, like comments or likes

You answered your own question.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Thanks for confirming! However my question is if that's all, or if there's more. I assume you mean that's it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yep, that's basically all of it. ActivityPub allows a reader to send messages back to the original poster. Those messages can be a comment, or a like, an upvote, a downvote, or a many others. That's what ActivityPub unlocks compared to RSS.

RSS only goes one way: the reader can read messages from the poster, but not send any messages to the poster.

edit: if anyone is curious about what the "many other" messages can be, the list is here, under Verbs: https://github.com/activitystreams/activity-schema/blob/master/activity-schema.md#verbs

Technically, that is part of ActivityStreams, not ActivityPub. But there is a lot of overlap there, and ActivityStreams is a necessary addition. For example, downvotes on Lemmy are not part of AP, but you'll find them in AS, called "dislike."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Activitypub is based on Activitystreams, and doesn't define any types of its own. Lemmy is fully compliant with the Activitypub standard as far as I know.

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