See Ben’s talk “”RSS -> twitter.com -> ActivityPub: Locking the [social] Web Open” at 4:15 pm on November 13, 2022.
One of Aaron’s many contributions was contributing to RSS 1.0, i.e. RDF Site Summaries. This talk explains the connection between Aaron’s work on RSS and future work at W3C standardizing a decentralized social networking protocol called ActivityPub.
As a teenager, Ben read Aaron’s blog and reddit via RSS. Since then, he’s worked on decentralizing the social web.