@clacke @alcinnz @kensanata @fluffy Exactly, it's the termination thing that clinches it. 😁

I'd have sympathy for an argument I don't think I've ever heard anybody make: perhaps section 3 should go the opposite direction, because it's for a fundamentally different purpose. The text talks about search results and similarly transient sequences IIRC. In that case it makes sense that the initial document would be "first" and you'd follow "next" links to find more. The authors might even have expected different applications to make different choices here according to the semantics of the collection. I don't think this is clear in the corresponding HTML link relations either.

I think it's funny that Mastodon actually implements #rfc5005 section 3, but I've wondered if that's an accident motivated by using the same link relations that HTML does, rather than anyone having been aware of this spec.

@clacke @alcinnz @kensanata @fluffy There is one issue I have with the #rfc5005 spec: it doesn't cover rationale so you have to read carefully between the lines to realize that everything in it is important and not just weird arbitrary choices. And that there's only one interpretation of section 4's prev-archive and next-archive which is fully consistent with both the text and the examples, because otherwise it's definitely ambiguous which temporal direction should be "previous" and which should be "next". I don't think section 3 manages to disambiguate that at all.

Meanwhile I don't tend to use hashtags because I've never learned how to make them useful 😅

@clacke @alcinnz @kensanata @fluffy Oh hi! Somebody called this my "white whale" so "zealot" might be fair I guess 😅

Other responses have covered a lot but I think it was running this unconference session that really helped me solidify my take on why #rfc5005 didn't catch on before: https://indieweb.org/2019/BeyondMicroblogs

I'm frustrated by my inability to get people to care. The WordPress ticket I filed in January has had absolutely zero response even though I have a working plugin that shows how to do it efficiently while getting the immutability requirements right. The PR I opened on jekyll-feed went silent as soon as I'd fixed all the code style things they asked for; they agreed I'd done so, then didn't merge it. I don't know how I can make this any easier for people.

Not an exaggeration to say this is the one thing I've wanted from the internet for three years now and I have no idea how to make it happen. 😭