A lot of the problems with #ActivityPub could be solved if we could all just collectively agree that it isn't a protocol but more like saying "I communicate in JSON."
So we're not communicating in AP, we're communicating the Mastodon API.
But there is a dedicated commitment to conflate them and in the protocol itself conflates them, which stifles the ability to work in this space.
The lack of a formal extension/handshake mechanism further makes it difficult to even get value from using it.
Hrefna (DHC)
in reply to Hrefna (DHC) • • •What would an alternative look like? A thought experiment.
* Formalize the protocol in OpenAPI. Not all of it, just the behavior and shape of the inbox and outbox.
* Formalize and render as testable all of the behavior with side effects.
* Remove basically all of the other fields from the Actor object.
* Type is always a list and starts from the Base Type then applies essentially mixins, which can be extensions
* Type is always strongly specified
* Collections have precisely defined navigation