@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).
@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!)