@Ian McKellar Definitely not under AGPL3+. You'd have a fork called FreeActivityPub so fast, your head would spin.

We already had this happen at least once in the fediverse. A fediverse project started off as MIT license, and years later the new maintainers decided to change the project to AGPL. But, legally, the AGPL only applies to new code on the project, and cannot and does not change the license of the earlier code. It was quickly forked. Now there are several MIT licensed forks based on the same code base that compete with them.

(What's even funnier is that the original developer of the project forked the project and currently maintains an MIT licensed fork himself and is no longer involved in the AGPL version.)

It is okay if platforms and software are AGPL, but the underlying protocol needs to be free for anyone to use without AGPL restrictions added onto it, because it would limit who can connect to the fediverse. Maybe that is some people's goal, but if it were tried, we would just fork it and create a free version that anyone can use.