I still don't think I understand why it was felt necessary to invent #ActivityPub, when #NNTP already existed and is proven to scale.
Why couldn't we just have an updated HTTP to NNTP gateway front end? #Fediverse
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@gcvsa ActivityPub's heritage is from RSS, not NNTP.
First, we evolved RSS to include information about reactions and changes to the social graph.
Then, we added push mechanisms, so that items are delivered when they're authored, in "real time".
Finally, we added privacy, so content is only sent to people you want to read it.
@gcvsa ActivityPub is a protocol that depends on your social graph -- who you follow, who follows you.
NNTP is much more about a global data structure, the news feed, and how to replicate it efficiently to different servers.
It was designed for public content, and mostly for text in reply trees. It supports binary data now, too.
It's a pretty big data set now.
@gcvsa I think I'd also say that RSS was an extremely popular system when we started working on ActivityPub. The feed structure matched more to the social networks of the time, and even today, than NNTP.
@gcvsa there have been social network systems that have the one-big-replicated-data-structure model that NNTP does. I think ATProto and Scuttlebutt have similar but not identical topologies.
@gcvsa hi! I'm one of the people responsible for ActivityPub. Mine are some of the feelings you are asking about.