Can We Get More Decentralised Than the Fediverse?

Re:Can We Get More Decentralised Than the Fediverse? by PaulHoule on Thursday February 29, 2024 @10:58AM (#39551065)

Note RSS is an ill-defined polling protocol. The server emits an RSS file which has the top N pieces of content.

All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?)

With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined strategy to keep synced.

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Re:Can We Get More Decentralised Than the Fediverse? by lxgr on Thursday February 29, 2024 @11:48AM (#39551832)

Oh wow, RSS really doesn't support pagination? I didn't know that.

WebSub can help with solving the poll rate issue, but that presumably wouldn't solve the problem for consumers that are offline for a while.

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Re:Can We Get More Decentralised Than the Fediverse? by zozbot234 on Thursday February 29, 2024 @05:24PM (#39556032)

ActivityStreams could be seen as a viable extension of RSS (aside from ActivityPub being based off it already) and it does support some simple pagination via its "Collection" vocabulary. Since ActivityStreams is ultimately based on JSON+LD, one could also add seamless querying support to an ActivityStreams endpoint based on SPARQL, for more advanced uses.

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Re:Can We Get More Decentralised Than the Fediverse? by ttepasse on Friday March 01, 2024 @07:06AM (#39560973)

There is RFC 5005 - Feed Paging and Arching, but sadly the world of RSS Tools has never been very specification-forward, mostly, because the publishers of RSS feeds are even more desinterested.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html

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