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?

  • Asudox@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    RSS readers just fetch a certain .rss file from a website and render that for you. RSS is a simple tool, it’s not even comparable to something like ActivityPub.

    You also have no way of discovering new stuff, you have to find them yourself. Whereas with ActivityPub you can. Nor can you interact with the feed objects (comment, like, etc).