Where do you get your #tech news from? Something to read with your morning coffee. Mastodon is great but maybe I'm not following some good hashtags as my feed is about 80% rust drama at the moment 😅
What are some good other sources for tech news and software engineering stuff? 👍
First off, @evan sees this from the perspective of someone who's co-authored #ActivityPub. It's his job to spur and enable adoption -- and that's something he's done exceptionally well for 20 years. Of course he wants to help Meta abide by open standards. Which, even if you dislike Meta, you would hope they would do.
My perspective is as one who is building products that compete with Meta. Ideally, I would like people who use Meta to migrate away from there and instead use #Calckey, #GreatApe, and the numerous options available on #SpaceHost.
But even from the perspective of a competitor, I want interoperability with #Barcelona. And even more, I want interoperability based on open standards.
Yes, yes, yes -- "embrace, extend, extinguish". At this point, that phrase is a broken record.
But every time that phrase comes up, I keep asking folks: when has the "extinguish" part of "embrace, extend, extinguish" ever worked?
People say #RSS, but RSS is still here and I use it every day. Hell, Calckey even has an RSS widget and it works like a charm. RSS is not extinguished.
People also say #XMPP, but I can run an XMPP server right now -- no problems. People say XMPP "died" because it's no longer as popular now, but is it because Meta and Google dropped support, or is it because Slack, Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, and even Matrix have come along to eclipse it in popularity? Regardless, even if XMPP is no longer so popular, it's not extinguished.
The most ludicrous example of "extinguish" people bring up is Gmail's dominance of email. But email is the most popular communications technology we have today, even though it's 50 years old. What's more, look at the raw stats. Gmail is only 18% of the email server market -- that's no monopoly. Go have a look at the stats for yourselves:
The pessimistic notion that we will "lose" by allowing Meta to interoperate with ActivityPub -- again, an open standard -- just doesn't convince me. In fact, if Meta is adopting standard ActivityPub, I think "losing" is impossible.
With Meta adopting ActivityPub, we're not losing. We're winning. We're not conceding to Meta by adopting their proprietary APIs for interoperability. They're conceding to us by adopting ActivityPub.
Again, I'm not saying you should all federate with #Barcelona. I'm saying that Meta adopting an open standard that allows for interoperability is a win because, remember, they're adopting our standard. We're not adopting theirs.
Some also ask, "But what if Meta does a bait-and-switch and drops ActivityPub support?"
Well, there's kind of precedence for that.
Not enough people realize this, but Google once adopted the predecessor of ActivityPub. Specifically, they used OStatus for Google Buzz. Certainly, like many Google products, Google Buzz shuttered.
But the development for an open social media protocol lived on, and we all use what was developed right now.
No doubt, if Barcelona becomes Meta's Google Buzz, ActivityPub will live on. It will still be developed. We'll keep using it.
In the meantime, I'll consider ways to help Meta users migrate to platforms that I believe are better.
@atomicpoet@evan I think you are really understating the damage Google Reader did to #RSS.
Yes, I still love and use RSS!
But, at the time, a broad mainstream community also loved and used RSS — almost entirely via Google Reader! When Google dropped it, that whole ecosystem disappeared. That mainstream community, which at that point was playing on Twitter but still followed RSS feeds, shrugged and fully embraced siloed social media. 1/
Look, it's not that I don't get the enthusiasm about #P92/#Barcelona —that's not the reason why I warn against federating with it <https://sociale.network/@oblomov/110397020867065165>. I do get it. There is something elating, validating, empowering even, when some{one,thing} Big & Famous (seems to) adopts “underdog” tech. I know because I've been there, both as a user and as a developer. But because of that, and for having been burned already not once, not twice, but three times at least, I know what to look out for.
The single most important thing to look out for is the difference between actually adopting a technology and “adopting” it. And this must be looked at not from the perspective of the user, but from that of the Big & Famous: how can they best use it to serve their own interest?
And here's the thing: #Meta/#Facebook has literally nothing to gain from actually adopting#ActvityPub, exactly as it had nothing to gain from #RSS or from #XMPP
In fact, all three of them go completely against everything that company and its products stand for. So why would they even bother adopting them if they weren't dragged into it kicking and screaming? Because “adopting” them gives them a unique opportunity to destroy them thanks to the company market size. And this is exactly what they've done with #RSS and #XMPP, and what they will do to #ActivityPub if we let them get even just a sliver of an inch in.
@andrewstroehlein Quite a "radio voice", and a nice alternative for those who prefer #audio!
If you turn this into a #podcast, please try to not have it locked in a walled audio garden. In short: If it doesn't provide a publicly available #RSS feed, it's not a podcast.
> I've never kept a list, but it strikes me how many people are dedicating to writing complete browser engines from scratch.. but in so many go-it-alone efforts, that likely the vast majority of these projects will strand. If only they'd unite, right?
For some I pinged you with the URL. I've also been in a thread, think with @aral about starting such united project (can't find that).
@boilingsteam I would use it more, but I kept going through this cycle where I would have too many to manage, and then I'd switch software and just start over. No #RSS reader prioritized saving time. But yes, in the infrequent case (now) when I really want to follow a feed that I can't follow on the fediverse, I will try to get a rss feed. And no, I will not sign up for their (f*cking) newsletter.
BTW one thing I realized is missing here (because as I was writing this thread I was also discussing this elsewhere, and my mind tried to avoid duplication): #RSS isn't the only thing Meta aka #Facebook and #Google siphoned the energy off: there was another important protocol that they #EEE-ed into oblivion: #XMPP, which was a federated (reminds you of anything), open, extensible protocol for chat/instant messaging.
@vowe Ich lese RSS-Feeds via #Feedly mit einer App namens @fieryfeeds auf #apple#iphone#ipad und #macOs genial, deutscher Programmierer, tolle Features, unkomplizierter Support auch via #mastodon Nur die Heise News kann man nicht extrahieren, hier fehlt scheinbar eine Schnittstelle, den man sieht nur den Titel und dann die Kommentare im #rss#feed
(And yes, that was really aimed at @mozilla as an invitation to bring back #RSS support in #Firefox, and to openly promote #JpegXL instead of keeping it hidden in @FirefoxNightly, and more in general to go against everything that #Google's chokehold on the web currently represent. Support user choice instead of crippling it. Prove that you are different.)
And of course, #Mastodon and other #Fediverse platforms also support #RSS, as producers, as consumers, or both. Several news sites still have feeds too, even though they don't always link to them in any user-visible part of the page, or even at all (secret URLs FTW).
I think this underlines the importance of stating what exactly is meant by “Google Reader (or whatever else) killed RSS”, and why the mindshare aspect mentioned above is so important:
And yes, as individuals this can be extremely frustrating, because the feeling is that even knowing what would be best to support the #openWeb, there's the feeling that our choice have little effect if any. And in this context, the non-ubiquitousness of #RSS production and consumption “where people gather” often means a need to double or triple the efforts to reach out and connect with other people with matching interests, especially for those whose livelihood depends on it.
I'll add to that that there's another form of media that still heavily employs #RSS, and those that follow me won't be surprised by my mention of this: #webcomics.
A lot of self-hosted webcomic sites build on #WordPress, so RSS availability isn't a big surprise, but I appreciate that (or rather, when) dedicated hosting solutions also offer the feature. (#ComicFury does it, and even #WebToons, while AFAICS #Tapas does not.)
I love Mastodon and I haven't been on Twitter for months. But I feel like I'm not meeting new people here and frankly a bit bored. I want to discover new voices and see more opinions, which is hard when there are no suggested people to follow. Tips anyone?
Thank you for voting, and while I'm sure this is an unusually #RSS user heavy crowd, I'm surprised that almost 80% of people want the full text; personally I skim the summaries and then jump to the ones I'm interested in. Time to update my feed to full text then 🛠️
If you’re using social networks to find news about the things you’re interested in (yes, that includes Mastodon), it’s time to stop and use something that was actually made for that: RSS!
So I made a quick video about this old tech, and how it’s still the absolute best way of curating what you read, watch, receive, or listen to:
Die Megakirche #Hillsong wirbt extrem offensiv um Spenden. Gottesdienstbesucher spenden alljährlich Dutzende Millionen Euro. Interne Unterlagen zeigen, wie die Chef-Pastoren darüber von Luxushotels und Geschenken profitieren – auch in Deutschland.
@tilvids@thelinuxEXP A while back I had the idea of setting up an #RSS reader that allowed users to 'retweet' feed items, creating the ability to have user curated feeds. This gives RSS even more of the advantages of social media without inheriting any of the downsides. I am still looking for more users to help me test things, as well as someone to build an Apple version if anyone wants to take a look - http://gametheatre.org/porifera/
After today a #Twitter applet on #IFTTT I have had set up since 2018 or so to monitor school closing alerts (published via tweet, and mass calls I didn't get) is going to be turned off.
I haven't had use for this since graduating (plus, my filter for it stopped working a long time ago). This is a situation that would benefit from #ActivityPub, or even #RSS even though the urgency of the alerts encourages push over pull...
Last week on Uploaded we talked about many things. Like discord changing their username system, which many people don't want to change, China exactly copying an Intel Core i3, someone smuggling a lot of gpus in a load of lobsters and more. Catch it in your podcast app by searching for "Uploaded Tech News" or get the links to most platforms here: https://linktr.ee/UploadingPodcast#podcast#podcasting#podcasts#RSS
If you have a private feed (e.g. as a subscriber to a Patreon channel) just copy/paste the RSS url into a form and you're done. The private feed will only be visible to those who have access to that unique URL.