Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't?
catloaf@lemm.ee 2 weeks agoNot 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.