@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.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@jackwilliambell @silverpill you've got a missing link: https://activitystrea.ms started as an extension to atom, and then developed a json serialization that could be used instead of or alongside the atom serialization. json activity streams 1.0 was taken to the w3c and evolved into activity streams 2.0, which optionally uses json-ld if you want to use external vocabularies.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@jackwilliambell @silverpill in practice, fedi uses external vocab anyway without json-ld, they just expect everyone else to have the exact same context instead of actually using the provided context. in other words, they hardcode understanding certain shorthand terms without actually checking if those terms mean what they think they mean. this mostly only works because mastodon is the de facto protocol and reference implementation, and not many people care about publishing activities.