Divisions by zero

This post is inspired by this prior post about a blog leaving the fediverse in favor of sticking to RSS:

Why do we advocate for, and pour hours of development into, ActivityPub rather than building clients which add a social layer to existing content distribution and communication protocols? I ask this in earnest, assuming that there is a comprehensive and well thought out array of reasons that I need to learn to fully grasp the project and it's motives.

It appears the fundamental design decision of Activity pub, shifting the hosting burden from a single host to a distributed network of server instances and user point of access to social content from a single host to any instance that will allow them to join and support the volume of content that they request to federate. This enables a more robust network, with instances holding content the users have interacted with regardless of if the original host instance goes down. It also reduces time to load for content after it has beed federated to a user's local instance, assuming it is closer in proximity and capable enough. At the same time, this dramatically increases the total storage burden (and to a lesser extent compute burden) of the network and makes content ownership and control a challenge.

Functionally the Fediverse is a public commons with content ownership practically distributed across the network of instances, whether copyright says so or not. Attempts to impose universal author controls on this framework face a lot of dissonance because it is fundamentally at odds with the underlying concept of federation as distributed hosting. The minute a host begins hosting content over which they have no control (such as encrypted posts) the potential for abuse skyrockets, and compromises between these priorities demand at minimum that users outside a host's instance maintain rights to delete and modify content on their instance whether or not they are otherwise at odds with the instance admin. Encryption also adds substantial compute burden to the network.

Since the popularization of the Distributed Social Network concept I have wondered whether pre-existing content distribution infrastructure like RSS/Atom might not be more advantageous as a backbone for social networking, with the development load shifted mostly to the client side and away from protocols. The IndieWeb project is playing with some of these ideas, and I have seen some prototypes online of RSS based social networks, so my question is, what is the fundamental advantage of ActivityPub over the combination of these other existing protocols with longer histories and broader existing implementation? RSS, Atom, email, XMPP, etc. Is lower latency really a good enough justification for widely redundant data distribution when the aggregation and discovery of content can be handled separately from hosting it?

This question becomes increasingly relevant when it comes to multimedia, and the minute that you offload multimedia to central servers by link embedding instead of hosting within the instance, boom you are back to the old centralized architecture and why are you federating?

So I am going to pose this question to the Fediverse myself, what is the reason that federated content distribution should be adopted for general use rather than distributed aggregation? That is to say of a client performed with the same features as a Fediverse front end, but all of the content was self-hosted and listed via RSS or Atom with comments handled via Webmention, direct messages via email or XMPP, and moderation and discivery handled at the level of aggregation via instances (meaning a user "joins" or "subscribes" to an instance, and that instance provides a ban list, list of feeds subscribed to by its users for discovery, provides a user directory) what would be the features that this type of system would lack that ActivityPub based systems have in place?

There are three advantages I see to AcrivityPub, and I'm not completely sure they justify mass adoption vs. the cost of broad redundancy of content and authorship issues. What am I missing?

1. Choosing local instance for faster loading, but this only is an advantage after content is brought in for the first time, in which case it actually is slower as first the instance has to pull the content and then serve it to the user.

2. "all" content in the protocol is of the same type, allowing for easier interoperability between clients and services. I'm thinking this is the root of what most people will say is the big advantage of ActivityPub vs. older protocols, but I'd like to hear more about why this is enough of a reason to overcome the inertia of existing mass adoption and support of the alternatives. Also, couldn't this also apply to a service built on an existing self-hosted protocol like Atom?

3. It isn't based in XML, and modern devs don't want to use XML. As I'm not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

What am I missing? I know it must be a lot, and I thank you in advance for cluing me in.

On Friday, the Human Rights Campaign said The Wall Street Journal’s reporting erroneously tying Kirk’s murder to the transgender community was “reckless and irresponsible” and led to a “wave of threats against the trans community from right-wing influencers.”

A San Diego Navy doctor was removed from command last week after right wing activists began sharing screenshots of her LinkedIn account on X.

Cmdr. Janelle Marra is a Navy physician with 21 years of service. According to her Navy biography, she's spent most of her career in the San Diego area, splitting time between San Diego Naval Medical Center and Camp Pendleton.

On her LinkedIn account, Marra lists she/her pronouns and her bio says she's the "Navy deputy medical director for transgender healthcare."

Libs of Tiktok, an account on X that shares anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracies, tagged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when she quote-tweeted a screenshot of the account saying, "Yikes" and asking Hegseth to "look into this."

That evening, Hegseth in turn quote-tweeted Libs of Tiktok writing, "Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired."

A Navy official with knowledge of the matter told KPBS Hegseth ordered Marra be fired. The official, who is not authorized to comment publicly on the case, said the official cause for Marra's removal was "a loss of trust and confidence in her ability to command," which is boilerplate rationale used by the Navy to justify all manner of firings.

Marra's social media use is now under investigation, the official said.

Marra did not respond to a request for comment.

Data centers aren't the sole cause of Ireland's high electricity prices, but they do contribute to them. The biggest cause is Ireland's reliance on imported natural gas.

That said, data centers are heading for 30% of the country's electricity use, and they contribute significantly to high prices. Effectively a subsidy from Irish consumers to Big Tech. There are other externalized costs, too. E.g. Supporting Big Tech data center infrastructure is delaying house building. Ireland is lucky in that most of Big Tech pays its European taxes to the Irish government, so there's a quid pro quo here. But that is less true for other parts of the world.

Some people think AI may need as big a share of other countries' electricity - who should be paying for this?

Government warned of rising household bills as data centres strain grid

BUCHAREST, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Romania scrambled fighter jets on Saturday when a drone breached the country's airspace during a Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure near the border, the defence ministry said.

A threat of drone strikes also prompted Poland to deploy Polish and allied aircraft and close an airport in the eastern city of Lublin, three days after it shot down Russian drones in its airspace with the backing of aircraft from its NATO allies.

The drone did not fly over inhabited areas and did not pose an immediate danger to the population," the statement said.

Nicola Davis Science correspondent
Sat 13 Sep 2025 02.00 EDT

According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 63,000 people have been killed in the territory – the majority of them civilians – with the true toll likely far higher.[...]

In response, a growing number of academic bodies are now distancing themselves from Israeli institutions. Last year the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil cancelled an innovation summit with an Israeli university, while a host of universities across Norway, Belgium and Spain have cut ties with Israeli institutions. Others, including Trinity College Dublin, followed suit this summer.

I wish everyone a great day and a safe one. I painted the background first. The rest was spontaneous, and there was really no thought that I remember.

(Ed Sheeran silently playing in the background)

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