> I have noticed a tendency for people supporting older, similar protocols to wonder why ActivityPub got so popular while their own stagnated
How do ya'll feel about ActivityPub on a technical level? I read the ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, and JSON-LD specs a couple years back, and came away feeling like it was a bit much. Wouldn't JSON RSS with some sort of web push notifications get us 80% of the way there? Are there simpler alternatives already in the wild? Or am I missing something?
My impression, and I've only skimmed through things at the technical level, is that ActivityPub isn't far from where RSS and various web push notifications might have naturally converged if things hadn't jumped tracks to walled gardens for several years in the middle there.
Some of that feeling is because my introduction to RDF was itself buried in dealing with the real world complexity of 90s and early 2000s RSS feeds. JSON-LD is no worse than early RDF, and in some ways better, clearer, easier to understand. Especially it feels easier to understand why it is useful to the ActivityPub standard, versus as complicated as RDF was it was sometimes hard to understand the impetus to bolting it on top of RSS, if for no other reason than that ActivityPub was built more directly around JSON-LD as opposed to RDF really was bolted on into the middle of the RSS soup (and its dozens of mostly compatible versions) and it was very confusing what/where/how RDF applied anywhere to RSS.
Some of the other parts of ActivityPub similarly seem smarter, simply better versions of now lapsed and/or only half-forgotten "standards" like PingBack/TalkBack or even the original goals of the (real) original OpenID efforts.
JSON Feed, the most widely accepted RSS in JSON standard, has so far managed to intentionally avoid depending on JSON-LD so far, but it's also tried to intentionally be a minimalist subset of RSS and all of the RDF in RSS stuff has been out of scope. Presumably should any of that be relevant again, JSON-LD would be the natural successor. (Similar too, that JSON Feed so far has left notifications support out of scope, but if it did expect to move in that direction they would be remiss to entirely avoid looking at what ActivityPub has already standardized.)
JSON-LD is not specific to ActivityStreams/Pub, it's a general mechanism for expressing any kind of RDF/Linked Data as reasonably idiomatic JSON. It makes sense for a federation-focused spec to use it so that it can be extended seamlessly with other sources of Linked Data. Social Linked Data (SOLID) will most likely rely on these mechanisms to interoperate cleanly with ActivityPub/ActivityStreams, for example.
How do ya'll feel about ActivityPub on a technical level? I read the ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, and JSON-LD specs a couple years back, and came away feeling like it was a bit much. Wouldn't JSON RSS with some sort of web push notifications get us 80% of the way there? Are there simpler alternatives already in the wild? Or am I missing something?