RSS > ActivityPub
2024-03-08
RSS is better than ActivityPub.
When I subscribe to content, I want:
- Resilient failsafes. ActivityPub has many points-of-failure. A notification might fail to complete transmission as a result of downtime, faults, or network conditions, and the receiving server might never know. A feed reader, conversely, can tell you that an address 404'd or the server was down.
- Retroactive access. Once you fix the problem above... you still don't get the message you missed: it's probably gone forever - there's no retroactive access. The same is true when your ActivityPub server connects with a peer for the first time: you only ever get new content after that point. RSS, on the other hand, provides some number of "recent" items the moment you first subscribe.
- Simple subscriptions. RSS can be served from a statically-hosted single file, which makes it suitable to deploy anywhere as well as consume using anything. It can be read, after a fashion, in anything from Lynx upwards.
RSS ticks all these boxes. If I can choose between RSS and ActivityPub to subscribe to your content, and I don't need a real-time update, I'm probably going to choose RSS.
Caveatty Footnote
I feel like this statement needs a few clarifications and caveats, but my hot take looks spicier if I bury them in a footnote!
- By RSS, I mean whichever pull-based basic HTTP you like, be that Atom, JSON Feed, h-entry, or even just properly-marked-up HTML5: did you know that the <article> element is intended to be suitable for syndication use?
- Obviously I appreciate that RSS and ActivityPub are different tools for different jobs, and there are doubtless use-cases for which ActivityPub is clearly the superior solution.
- I certainly don't object to services providing both RSS and ActivityPub as syndication options, like Mastodon does, where both might be good choices.
