The IndieWeb’s POSSE is a rather sophisticated syndication philosophy. Too bad I’ve got such a disdain for social media that I’d never explore it personally. It’s a good approach for working on other people’s stuff though: think Facebook’s (Meta) instant RSS articles (dies April 2023), podcast feeds, or any other (kinda) bi–directional site syndication mechanism.

The hypothetical outcomes/incentives of POSSE if it was done by everyone is an entertaining thought experiment.

It seems that.. from talking to a few people via email, basic feed discovery with rel alternates are ineffective. Simple redirects work better for organic discovery.

1. /atom -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed
2. /rss -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed
3. /feed -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed

I was reading web.dev recently and couldn’t help but think that in tech circles/articles online it’s easy to get the impression that Firefox is a major competing browser. Firefox actually doesn’t even register. Firefox has an estimated 3% points in global market–share and doesn’t even show up in mobile market–share estimates.

Users implicitly use Safari (Apple) and/or some derivation of Chromium (Google Chrome). When was the last time you saw someone irl using Firefox? Not recently if you’re outside the tech bubble.

Of course in my case the social media applications within the Fediverse are not what’s most interesting. It’s the generality of its protocol. ActivityPub appears to have an easier time with different use cases than other protocols.

The link to a Fediverse server list in a previous post died but fediverse.party also shows the diverse types of applications that use the ActivityPub protocol.