Thread a couple of years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233412

One of the things I love about RSS and its clients is that I can walk away from my computer for a month, and then catch up (or not! I can mark feeds, folders, or the whole thing as read!) on what I've missed, whether it's from someone posting something once an hour, or something once a year, as the author suggests.

But with Spring 83, I leave a board, and may come back to a totally different board, knowing nothing of the context of how it got to where it is now. It's the equivalent of AIM status messages!

That's probably a feature in some people's minds, which is fine, but it's definitely not a feature for me.

This kind of reminds me of Instagram stories, somewhat ephemeral, the current state of being of people I follow, and things I'm interested in. I guess I like the federated timeline because it's a federated timeline of things I care about.

Question: why would I use this, when it seems like it has less functions than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) ?

> Spring ’83 doesn’t formalize interactions and relationships. The protocol doesn’t provide any mechanism for replies, likes, favorites, or, indeed, feedback of any kind. Publishers are encouraged to use the full flexibility of HTML to develop their own approaches, inviting readers to respond via email, join a live chat, send a postcard … whatever!

I think this is one of the biggest missing features of this sort of decentralized approach to following/aggregating content. There is so much in the commenting/interaction handling of the current centralized approach that keep people coming back.

Interesting!