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submitted 8 months ago by trwnh@mastodon.social to c/fediverse@fedia.io

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idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something). it's what you might call a "hot take", certainly a heterodox one to some parts of the broader #fediverse community. this is in response to recent discussion on "what do you want to see from AP/AS2 specs" (in context of wg rechartering) mostly devolving into people complaining about JSON-LD and extensibility, some even about namespacing in general (there was a suggestion to use UUID vocab terms. i'm not joking)

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[–] trwnh@mastodon.social 1 points 8 months ago (81 children)

which is to say: the primary reason that #ActivityPub is used (to the extent you can say it is being used at all) in the #fediverse is mostly historical.

fedi grew out of a long line of open protocols, and before AP was adopted, it was at the point where people primarily used "activity streams" as their vocabulary and data model, stuffed into atom feeds. atom feeds don't do private posts unless you make an entirely new access-controlled feed, possibly with a token of some sort. hence, AS2.

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[–] trwnh@mastodon.social 1 points 8 months ago (80 children)

when #ActivityPub was being standardized alongside AS2 it basically had two compelling reasons for what would become the #fediverse to adopt it:

it was built on AS2, which was an evolution of AS1, which was already being used. so it wasn't hard to make the jump.
it made followers-only posts possible, because while atom feeds could do this, it was wildly inconvenient to actually do it that way. posting something private to an inbox is a lot simpler, no juggling access control tokens.

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[–] trwnh@mastodon.social 1 points 8 months ago (79 children)

but beyond that, what does #ActivityPub actually do for #fediverse as a "network" "protocol"? basically nothing. you have a basic mechanism for delivering activities directly to subscribers, but no specified shape or structure for that payload. and you still need a lot of other specs to end up with something that talks to the "network". even with AS2 vocab, you need more vocab extensions to express things you want to.

simply put, AP is not enough for a "protocol" to build a "network".

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[–] darius@friend.camp 1 points 8 months ago

@trwnh@mastodon.social This is related to my recent-ish realization (which I always knew on some level but never formulated explicitly) that AP simply does not have much to say about the mechanics of federation. And that there is basically nowhere that federation is defined; it is pretty much left as an implementation detail for the author of a server to figure out

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