submitted 1 week 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 1 week ago

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 1 week ago

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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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024

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