Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't?

Zak@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Not really. They’re making requests, probably at least once a day. That makes it very easy to count active users. With subscribers, you can have a big number, but they’re not necessarily all active, and unless they’re on your instance, you can’t see how often they’re reading.

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  • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They’re making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or I’ve use might have multiple IPs.

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    • jonne@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Or back in the days where Google Reader was a thing, one request from them could represent millions of readers.

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    • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’d argue it’s still a better representation than subscriber count. It is similar to the disparity between YouTube’s subscriber count vs video view count.

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    • catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Deduplicate by IP/user-agent and you’ll get a pretty accurate count. Some people might be moving between wifi and data, but for the most part you can account for that. Same process as fingerprinting a browser.

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      • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yes, it’s possible to get a rough estimate with some technical work, but AP makes it easy for anyone.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        If you any one single popular cloud service that fetches the data for the users and this stops being true.

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