Re: Dropping .host-meta from WebSub

GNU Social

On May 1, 2017 12:54:11 PM EDT, Aaron Parecki <aaron@parecki.com> wrote:
>Does anyone know of any actual *live* implementations of WebSub (or
>PubSubHubbub, any version) that use the .host-meta method of
>advertising
>the hub URL, or any consumers that check for it? I did a bit of looking
>around at some of the major players and couldn't find any that did. If
>you
>know of a publisher or consumer that supports it, please share the URL
>to
>it.
>
>To clarify, I'm talking about the third method of Discovery listed
>here:
>https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/#discovery
>
>> publishers may also use the Host-Meta Well-Known URI [RFC6415]
>/.well-known/host-meta to include the <Link> element with rel="hub"
>
>We plan to exit CR on 2017-05-11, and if we don't have at least two
>claims
>of implementations of that feature, we'll be dropping it from the spec
>when
>we exit CR. It's important that if any implementations of this feature
>exist, we hear about them ASAP.
>
>I did add support to websub.rocks for discovering the hub URL using
>this
>method, and the test suite is now logging whether anyone publishes a
>URL
>that advertises the hub that way, so we'll get a bit of data from that.
>However I don't want to waste the time writing tests to check whether
>subscribers support this, since there's no evidence of demand for the
>feature. I also don't want the presence of the test to cause new
>subscribers to have to do the extra work of checking the .host-meta
>file
>just to pass the test suite.
>
>So far, all known WebSub/PubSubHubbub publishers support rel discovery
>through the HTTP Link or HTML/XML tags, so there was never any
>incentive
>for subscribers to check the .host-meta as well, so I strongly suspect
>there just aren't any subscribers that check for it.
>
>Since this feature is already marked At Risk, the data is strongly
>pointing
>towards dropping it on the 11th.
>
>If this feature is important to you, then please show evidence that
>it's
>been implemented in any form, and I would also highly encourage you to
>write a test for it in websub.rocks.
>
>Aaron Parecki
>https://aaronparecki.com/

-- 
Evan Prodromou evan@e14n.com
https://e14n.com/evan