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Comment by kickscondor | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know. It feels like SOAP - or XML-RPC. These protocols that are just layered on top of HTTP keep coming, but they never seem to gain adoption. In part because - what are static websites supposed to do to participate?

This was the beauty of RSS. I didn’t love RSS, because it eliminated all the styling from blog posts - but it did achieve real widespread usage.

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You can syndicate static websites with ActivityPub, pretty much the same way as you do with RSS, except you're generating JSON-LD (ugh) rather than XML (ugh). I've seen a proof-by-example, but I don't have the URL where I can easily find it. The downside is that Mastodon, the most used AP server, doesn't provide a way of subscribing to a static AP feed (it might work if you also had a simple webfinger script to point to it).

I actually like the 'eliminate all the styling' feature of RSS. It's kind of a pleasure to read blog posts and news articles in my mobile feed reader (tt-rss for android).

Except for when the content wasn’t included. That was the problem with RSS. It could never decide whether it was supposed to be distributing the content or distributing notifications of the content.

That decision was made by the drive for “pageviews” both by ad-driven pages and others that just wanted to know how many people were reading.

Yeah, RSS feeds that aren't full content annoy me. But it's very few blogs that have them; mainly newspapers.

It was also made because quite a few services used RSS feeds for uses like auto posting bots and what not, where they got information from a blog/news site and posted about on their forums/social media service. In those cases, you didn't want it to post the full article.

Okay, interesting - maybe this article: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas... ?

I appreciate the pointer! I expect that ActivityPub is the right idea, but just needs to be refined by competitors. Much like XML-RPC and SOAP eventually gave way to REST. It could be the real deal, though.

I wouldn't mind if AP-using projects like Mastodon also let you subscribe to RSS feeds. That way RSS could keep doing what it's good at while AP handles everything else.

> what are static websites supposed to do to participate?

Yes the challenges of hosting applications (anything that serves dynamic data, like an ActivityPub server) on the internet is a real problem. Hosting a static site is easy, you have lots of choices, and it's highly portable. Don't like your host? Move.

But at the moment, hosting anything dynamic is an order of magnitude more complex to set up and to maintain. You either have to spin up a whole VM, or go to closed "serverless" providers.

I just started working on a project that I hope will make hosting personal server apps trivial.

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