Hey 👋 if you don’t know us already, we’re building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that’s to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I’ve tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it’s not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
That sort of aggregating would make more sense in an RSS reader. RSS feeds are exactly for that purpose.
But a platform trying to interop from an infinite number of unrelated platforms just seems odd.
@mark you can’t reply, share or even like a post with a rss reader, I believe one of actititypub goals is to replace rss
personally, I follow an important amount of users and then class them into mastodon lists (tech, politics, movies, news…)
You can reply and interact on platforms from an RSS reader. All an RSS feed is is a list of links. When you click them, you go directly to the platform. When using on a mobile device, RSS readers will even open the app for you to reply or interact with posts.
The fediverse will never replace RSS feeds. They serve a totally different purpose.
@mark why do u want me to use the rss feed instead of my following list ? whats the difference between them for u?