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Oblomov

@trwnh this was a fascinating read, thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the blog post.

I've had thoughts along those lines since I've started using Mastodon and getting familiar with AP, which I always saw as an extension of email and Usenet rather than a more general tool for the “social web” —and even for that it's being held back by the absence of a “content independent” AP server (AFAIK the only one in development is Vocata, and it still has some way to go).

2 comments
infinite love ⴳ replied to Oblomov

@oblomov yeah, there's the old "it's like email but for websites!" which isn't terribly inaccurate, but that's honestly more a consequence of "HTTP POST to ldp:inbox" than anything else in AP. the side effects for each activity kinda stray from that model and go into almost RPC-like territory. there's also some potential redundancy with HTTP verbs, but that's because HTTP verbs don't notify arbitrary audiences (although i guess they could do that with a header!)

Oblomov replied to infinite love ⴳ

@trwnh actually what made me think of “extensions of email and newsgroups” was more the object structure, but on second thought that's more an ActivityStream characteristic than an ActivityPub one, although an actual implementation of the C2S part of AP would still fit the bill in some sense.

(Yeah, the lack of usage of DELETE and PATCH surprised me initially, but the fact it would have needed to also define how to propagate them partially explains it.)

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