Lady @Lady@cat.family

that's a bowl of legos, not candy

i figured this out btw xsltproc just doesn't know that HTML elements have a namespace in 2022; you have to null-namespace them

@alyssa i only like blueberries in things, in like small pieces

whole blueberries i'm not fond of

who's a good dog?

dog

@maya in case you aren't aware, OStatus (what preceded AP) was built on Atom feeds. they were still Also Push, because that's the only way to get "real-time updates", but they could also hypothetically be pulled.

i can't speak for the AP designers but the biggest immediate problem that posed mastodon was followers-only posts. obviously you don't want those to be public, in a easily accessible feed…… so they were implemented as push-only. they couldn't be pulled

you might wonder, but surely we can just authenticate before responding with sensitive information! and:

1. we didn't have those authentication mechanisms at that time

2. we maybe still don't have them in a way which is safe against, like, replay attacks? not sure on this one

3. the amount of bookkeeping required to generate a specialized feed for a specific request is much bigger than the amount of bookkeeping required to just send a post to everyone on a list and then forget about it

so that's basically the crux of it. if every post has public access then pull is feasible, but it's a lot harder if posts have limited audiences. and since you have to do pushes anyway if you want real-time notifications, adopting a purely push-based model was simply easiest

if meowing is a learned behaviour does that mean we can teach other animals to do it too

“does that mean… i’m being cared about… right now?”