technology hot take 

Gemini 🤝 Fediverse
Most of its use cases are better covered by RSS/Atom feeds

technology hot take 

@ljwrites you know… the fediverse was originally built on Atom lol

technology hot take 

@Lady I did not know that but it's unsurprising

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re: technology hot take 

@ljwrites Yeah the original fediverse federation protocol was called OStatus, and was just Atom + Salmon (thing to inform servers of new posts / favourites / etc in real time) + Portable Contacts (extra metadata for defining accounts).

It was replaced by ActivityPub to address the following failings:

1. OStatus was an amalgamation of specifications which weren’t necessarily designed with each other in mind. ActivityPub is one specification and easier to implement.

2. Atom is very verbose, which isn’t a problem for things like blog posts, but it’s a little awkward to be sending this huge chunk of data for a post which just says “awoo”.

3. Atom (and OStatus) were only ever designed with public, general‐use internet publishing in mind, and didn’t have mechanisms for designating the intended audience of a post, which is important for social media. ActivityPub has to, cc, and bcc fields, the same as email.

If you don’t make frequent (multiple times an hour) short posts, don’t care about designating a specific audience, and don’t need the real‐time aspects of social media (like favourites), Atom is still a better solution. We’re just in an awkward place where most people publishing to the internet right now expect at least one of those things.

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re: technology hot take 

@Lady lol yeah, through the years I've seen email brought up a lot as the original federated standard and it's no surprise that ActivityPub is basically a love child of Atom and email. This is such an excellent and concise breakdown, thank you!

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A small, community‐oriented Mastodon‐compatible Fediverse (GlitchSoc) instance managed as a joint venture between the cat and KIBI families.