@silverpill'n> "But ActivityPub is the evolution of Atom/RSS, with JSON instead of XML..."'nNot exactly.

[jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com]

@silverpill

> "But ActivityPub is the evolution of Atom/RSS, with JSON instead of XML..."

Not exactly. ActivityPub is based on ActivityStreams. And ActivityStreams are a variant of RDF using JSON-LD instead of RDF XML. So, at best ActivityPub is based on RSS 2.0. (Which itself is overly complex IMHO.)

> "Perhaps you actually want a 'Really Simple ActivityPub'?"

Sort of. I want something much simpler anyway. But I don't want to use JSON-LD, so no direct interop will be possible.

[jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com]

@silverpill

Follow this link and scroll down to my contribution:

> (fixed url) https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/115335451897410462

There I explain (a) I don't have a problem with subject/predicate/object triplet-based network graphs, but (b) lots of people have difficulty conceptualizing them.

JSON-LD, like RDF XML, is incredibly flexible and you can do amazing things with it based on few simple rules. But, as I wrote in this ancient Slashdot post, RDF is hard PRECISELY because RDF is simple:

> https://slashdot.org/~Jack%20William%20Bell/journal/16717

[jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com]

@silverpill

While I'm referring to that ancient Slashdot post, let me surface a comment offering a reason why Dave Winer didn't like RDF and my response.

The point here? Whenever we have something like JSON-LD or RDF XML (or, for that matter, SOAP) we are dealing with what some people (and I among them) will call an over-engineered mess.

In this conceptualization ActivityStreams are capable of supporting nearly ANY use case. But they are over-engineered for 80% of use cases.

[jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com]

@silverpill

Also, FWIW? In the end Dave Winer was right about the 'Semantic Web'. Not only did it *not* take the web by storm, it failed PRECISELY for the reasons Dave said it would fail.

You can say a lot of things about Dave, I know I've said most of them. But I've come to fully internalize and accept his main orgainizing precept: "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work."

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@jackwilliambell

I want something much simpler anyway. But I don't want to use JSON-LD, so no direct interop will be possible.

It's hard to find a developer who wants to use JSON-LD in a social application. But the good news is that JSON-LD is not required, and not even used: our servers produce and consume plain JSON documents. Yes, these documents have @context property, but for most implementations this is purely ceremonial thing.

Here's some test data: https://funfedi.dev/support_tables/hashtag_jsonld/

That's what I meant when I said that the flavor of ActivityPub we use in Fediverse is already quite close to 'Really Simple ActivityPub'. Nobody wanted an over-engineered protocol, so it was simplified and optimized by early adopters.