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 @zack @jalefkowit Agreed about the minimum. I've been wondering about treating RSS as a bridging problem, trying to have a small number (maybe one, mostly) hosts doing the bridging using full OStatus. So you follow mit_edu_topic_media_lab@bridge.example (with full ostatus support) until the media lab is ready to do ostatus properly. Also maybe bridging reddit, tumbler, medium, ...
