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What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't?
(lemy.lol)
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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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That's most of it. ActivityPub also makes it possible to know who is subscribed. It's very hard to count how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed.
Not really. They're making requests, probably at least once a day. That makes it very easy to count active users. With subscribers, you can have a big number, but they're not necessarily all active, and unless they're on your instance, you can't see how often they're reading.
They're making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or one user might have multiple IPs.
Or back in the days where Google Reader was a thing, one request from them could represent millions of readers.
I'd argue it's still a better representation than subscriber count. It is similar to the disparity between YouTube's subscriber count vs video view count.
Deduplicate by IP/user-agent and you'll get a pretty accurate count. Some people might be moving between wifi and data, but for the most part you can account for that. Same process as fingerprinting a browser.
Yes, it's possible to get a rough estimate with some technical work, but AP makes it easy for anyone.
AP doesn't really do this. A subscriber may be a dead account, or may be someone that hasn't checked your feed in months. Even a technical analysis would be difficult here.
One single popular cloud service that fetches the data for the users and this stops being true.