This is one of my other recurring frustrations every time I dip back into ActivityPub, tying into the lack of well defined semantics.
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This is one of my other recurring frustrations every time I dip back into ActivityPub, tying into the lack of well defined semantics.
People will readily say "oh you can just do this! <insert thing that no one is doing right now>"
That's a research protocol. It doesn't give me guidance on building a usable system. There's no built-in mechanism for feature discovery or protocol handshakes, so there's no way for a server to know how to interact with another system here.
https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/113051946822578560 -
People will say, correctly, that you "can" get around this by any number of mechanisms. This is true.
But if no one knows what you are doing and others do it differently, then there's no way to build a usable system for end-users. So it takes a lot of handholding, guesswork, and synchronizing based on how the large providers are doing things.
Which is not what people say they want, but it is what we have.
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Clifford Adamsreplied to Hrefna (DHC) on last edited by
@hrefna
People *say* they want ActivityPub, but what they almost always mean is they want something compatible with Mastodon servers and/or clients. (Someone should give that protocol a name. 🤪) -
Hrefna (DHC)replied to Clifford Adams on last edited by
@wikicliff People tell me they want ActivityPub and then they describe something that is…
…not ActivityPub.