What if you could follow a Web site that publishes its content in an Atom feed in Mastodon, the same way you follow people?
And you could boost items from that feed, and your own followers would see them just like they do when you boost a toot?
In other words, what if we cross-bred a social network with a feed reader?
@jalefkowit I really like this idea but I think @Gargron is opposed to it. At least he was the last time I saw it brought up
@zack @jalefkowit i mean in a way mastodon is already based on feeds, but the problem is where you draw the line of what constitutes an ostatus account. right now the minimum is feed + salmon endpoint (for sending replies) + websub hub (for receiving real-time updates). I don't think it makes sense to remove those minimums.
@jalefkowit @zack if you remove websub requirement, you will have accounts that never update. if you remove salmon, you will have accounts that are black holes for interactions. plus webfinger is the only way we can define things as username@domain
@Gargron @jalefkowit I don't know anything about these protocols so bear with me please.
Re: removing websub requirement. Why would somebody create an account that never updates? Couldn't the server purge accounts with no activity within a threshold period?
Re: removing salmon requirement. These accounts could be marked or use a reserved handle. (At feed at example.com)