WebSub is a nice idea that collapses at scale
Quote
web sub is a great is a great idea. And it does democratize some of the subscription stuff. But at scale, it completely falls down.
Episode 40: Miami or bust? That's right. It's Friday, when you're listening to this it's (approx., from transcript intro) 00:40:52 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
Voice-matched
Summary
Dave lists WebSub's problems. Re-subscribing to 1.6 million Anchor feeds takes a dedicated server. Many big hosts don't support it because they'd have to run a hub sending hundreds of webhooks per update. The free public Google hub is overloaded and misses a lot. And it carries only feed-change notifications, nothing like live-stream alerts.
Also said
Episode 2: Episode 2 00:58:04 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
you never know, am I not getting an update? Because the feed didn't update? Or am I not getting an update? Because the RSS cloud hub is not sending me anything?
Voice-matched
Episode 4: Episode 4 01:04:05 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
The Pub Sub stuff is not reliable enough to purely depend on it,
Voice-matched
Episode 37: dan, what's up, Doc? Oh, yeah, man, we got the boardroom packed today. Once (approx., from transcript intro) 00:23:10 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
If you're just one person that has that wants to subscribe to 1000 feeds, he's webs, I'm not a big deal, right? If you need to subscribe to 3 million feeds, you need a better way.
Voice-matched