I think that’s a pretty good analogy in this case
Comment on Ghost blog adding activitypub
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 20 hours agoI look at it like this: ActivityPub is to RSS as a GUI is to a CLI.
Meaning, you could already use the tools (RSS or the CLI) that are there to do the task, but someone has created something (protocol, AP or application, GUI) to make that task easier. In the case of RSS and AP, that task is generally getting content in front of the user. With RSS I have to go hunt down RSS feeds and whatnot, but with AP I just interact with stuff and wait for the people I interact with to interact with stuff, and then I get content.
SilentKnightOwl@slrpnk.net 19 hours ago
ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 7 hours ago
Honest question as I finally dusted back off my interest in RSS. With RSS I need to add the URL to my client and it periodically checks back to show me when new content is posted, does ActivityPub handle this differently? Like how does it know which sources to use without having to hunt down their AP feed and add it to a client?
I could totally be missing something super simple or implied.
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
For whatever reason I’m struggling to remember how to properly explain the difference between push/pull protocols, but AP only moves data at a users request.
This means that if I follow you on Mastodon, and you comment on a post by some other third party which I have no interaction with, it’s going to bring that comment to me and bring along any other related data. In this case, that means the post you commented on and all of the other comments and data related to that post.
This cycle works constantly, so I get content from the other side of the world because I (in reality, my instance, not me in particular) interacts with a chain of instances to keep data flowing
ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 4 hours ago
Thanks for the explaination!
That definitely sounds like it could be a nice upgrade depending on well it could be filtered (I could see that spidering out pretty quickly if the things you follow interact a lot). Definitely something I’ll have to check out sometime, thanks again.