Have you ever wondered why #ActivityPub/AS2 has two media types?
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Have you ever wondered why #ActivityPub/AS2 has two media types? Here's a historical discussion about the tradeoffs between activity+json and ld+json. Does anybody know why they decided to use *both* media types?
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/Media_type_for_AS2 -
One quote from the W3C discussion: "the first question is what the "metamodel" of AS really is. is it some improvement/variation of AS1's JSON foundation, or is it JSON-LD and thus RDF? my claim is that it cannot reasonably be both." Well said! /cc @nik
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@naturzukunft @nik I have similar feelings, but I understand the points @evan makes (to some extent). Most Fediverse developers are not interested in learning Linked Data technologies. However, I think the JSON-LD / plain JSON ambiguity in AP causes more problems for those developers than it solves (if it solves any). I don't see any significant extensibility support for plain JSON consumers, although it's claimed to provide it if severe restrictions are placed on JSON-LD context usage.
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@naturzukunft @nik @evan By severe restrictions, I mean only allowing a list of URLs to external context documents and treating that as a list of extension identifiers (if I understood correctly). Ironically, some of most widely used AP extensions (Mastodon, for example) don't use this technique and embed their own context.