@evan I was speaking from an Admin/Dev standpoint, not user.

But the effort required from admins and devs is a factor in the ease of use of any project; ultimately, if it's to be considered easy, we have to take into account the need to either hire or inspire talent.

To publish RSS (as I understand it), you add an endpoint to your website where your content is presented into a parseable format that readers can present in their context, and you format your content accordingly. That's basically a markup language, unless there's more going on behind the scenes with RSS that I don't comprehend, and anyone can understand a markup language, if they're willing to try.

ActivityPub, on the other hand, has to talk to a lot of other AP things, on an ongoing basis. There is Compute and Network Connectivity and Databases involved. That's hard. You have to point those highly vulnerable things at the public-facing Internet. That's treacherous.

You might, if you can hire or inspire enough talent, and also fund the thing, make it just as easy for the end user, but don't act like that's easy. Or necessarily even good.

edit: read first couple paragraphs of blog. You're basically saying we can use a subset of AP formatting in a one-way manner to replace RSS... which, if someone chooses to boost it on Mastodon, will be automatically transformed back into RSS...

I think we should just use RSS, and remember Aaron. I tell my friends who are not here but who might want to keep track of my ongoing public meltdowns and outrages that the good news is, they can follow me on RSS without any need to join Mastodon. I suppose I'm worried about inceptions beginning to happen, and circular conversions.

@smallcircles @bobjonkman I think "very unfortunate" is an exaggeration.

Should publishing with ActivityPub be about as easy as publishing with RSS?

#EvanPoll #poll #ActivityPub #RSS #publishing

@bobjonkman @evan Relevant: http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/04/aBusyDevelopersGuideToSoap.html.

Back in the day both Dave Winer (no Fediverse handle?) and Sam Ruby ( @samruby) showed ways to do The Simplest Possible Thing with SOAP.

I usually don't give a response to polls until they're done but since I just published a blog post on this topic it feels dishonest not to link to it.

Static ActivityPub Publishing

One of the requests I (Evan) have heard often over the years about ActivityPub is to make publishing on the Fediverse as easy as publishing with RSS. To make an RSS feed for a person or a site, a publisher provides, dynamically or even statically, a single file, with a simple format, and makes it…

Social Web Foundation (socialwebfoundation.org)