social media protocols, i know, keep scrolling
ignore the site title, this is a nice little piece
https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/
but partially does make me want to dig up the thought process in the design of activitypub moving away from RSS-itude
i'm sure it's documented, but has someone secondary-sourced it into a blog post or whatnot?
social media protocols, i know, keep scrolling
@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
social media protocols, i know, keep scrolling
@Lady I guess what I'm jonesing for is the history of how the actual AP designers *decided* on stuff. which factors came up in explicit discussion and which didn't, which corners were thought of as most important not to cut, etc etc. like we can analyze the technical artifacts but i'm most curious about the decision-making context, you know?