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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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I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I'm concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.
A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn't done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.
The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.
Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I've subscribed to a few of them and it's actually pretty awesome.
From what I see, ActivityPub doesn't seem to solve the problem of sorting or prioritizing content. In fact, I believe RSS wins here, because it is easier to do this on the client side with RSS, as it is assumed the client has all the content from the RSS feed without any biased order, whereas with activity pub, it varies by provider and instance.
Sorting and filtering can be done well on the client side, and the plus side is the user can have a ton of choice here. It just so happens that our algorithms for that in the open source world are no match for the addiction-inducing ones of Twitter and others.
You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.
That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.
I fully agree with you, but I think this isn't because RSS clients can't do this from a technical perspective. I suppose most RSS clients come from people with anti algorithm sentiment, but realistically, a RSS client has all what it needs to implement basic or advanced sorting and filtering.
But I agree with you that most rss readers out there have that problem.
I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There's no reason someone couldn't write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.