I've never quite understood the appeal of ActivityPub.<p>Looking at the list of goals in the article, the only benefit in addition to what can easily be done with RSS is knowing who follows me. Maybe its just me, but if I'm writing to a blog or a microblog I just don't really care who follows me or even who reads it.<p>There are more social features built into ActivityPub, likes and shares for example, but at that point I'm likely not running my own server and am trusting a third party to do it for me. The idea that there are multiple hosts I can choose to trust rather than one centralized one feels more like a principled argument than one based on real benefits of, for example, owning my own content or censorship resistance.
One of my issues with ActivityPub is that there is no such thing as a cut-down completely static AP feed for blogs. I want Mastodon users to be able to follow my static blog but I don't want to implement the machinery to have full interactivity.<p>Basically an RSS bridge would work fine. I know such things already exist but it would be cool if it was built into AP.<p>Right now I just manually post my blog post to my Mastodon account which is perfectly fine.
On a related note, see Hollo: <a href="https://github.com/fedify-dev/hollo">https://github.com/fedify-dev/hollo</a>
This is really useful, thanks.<p>I've recently been playing around selfhosting a small single user activitypub server to see how it works. I can't understate how satisfying it's been to wallow in compared to a static site or serverless setup. It unexpectedly tickled that special "oooh, a _system_" part of my brain, a lot.
> To simplify the tutorial, we'll impose the following feature constraints:<p>> There is no search functionality.<p>This makes sense for the tutorial, but search functionality would be awesome for discovery, both in terms of people finding your blog as well as finding other interesting blogs to follow. Niche blogs seem more difficult to find these days when Google only seems to surface websites with the right keywords.