I think (and have been saying this a bunch lately) that he's right about ActivityPub and Mastodon, and that "a universal timeline" is actually a really good way to put words to it. I was a Mastodon hater for years, but having used it for the past month or so with an actual community of people (really: the whole community I interacted with on Twitter before), I have to admit it: the ActivityPub people were right about this. It's easy to see the potential, and how it pulls in the writing we were all doing before there was Twitter while keeping most of what Twitter was good for too.

I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)

May I ask what was your original argument against Mastodon?

I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. I'm still not bullish about that. But once you use it, you see that it's basically hyper-interactive RSS.

(Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)

To be fair, there still isn't an easy way (that I know of) to make sites (dynamic first, static later) ActivityPub participants.

I'd love it if my site's posts were ActivityPub posts, with ActivityPub replies being shown on the site as comments. I think that would be an amazing thing, but it's currently not very easy to do.

I guess I better get coding again.

This is similar to how micro.blog has implemented ActivityPub support, from what I can gather. Here's their documentation from when the feature was released: https://help.micro.blog/t/mastodon-and-activitypub/95

Oh excellent, thanks! I wonder how hard it is to make an RSS-to-ActivityPub service.

I made my own thing, fetching an RSS feed and posting entries to an existing account. It makes the code much simpler, but is not practical if you have lots of feeds (you need yo create all accounts separately): https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/