Egregoros

@icedquinn @coolbean @vic
>afaik the big crime with that is that people are parsing the json as-is and the ld tags are just for show. which means its basically not ld, since namespace resolution isn't being done,

JSON-LD in ActivityPub is entirely optional and always was. You are supposed to be able to use it as plain JSON. If it was forced, most of the implementations would not exist these days, because parsers for JSON-LD barely exist. Those that try to make their own (Friendica and Iceshrimp notably) have constant issues with it especially in performance and when new contexts get added as extensions. It's a shitshow that only the LD fetishists in the WGs support, of which there are few.

This also creates subtle issues with representations for both LD and non-LD consumers. Completely valid ActivityPub documents may look different to LD consumers compared to pure JSON consumers.

What the AP writers did was, replace XML which was much better at this completely unnecessary linked data thing, with something that is far worse at it and almost impossible to implement properly. Honestly, JSON-LD in ActivityPub should just die, there's exactly zero need for it.

@markwyner What you are referring to as ActivityPub is actually Mastodon/ActivityPub or as I've recently started calling it Mastodon + ActivityPub. ActivityPub is not a functional social media protocol unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Mastodon network made useful by the Mastodon backend, Mastodon frontend and vital extensions comprising a full social media protocol as defined by Mastodon. Many social media users run a similar implementation of the Mastodon protocol, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of Mastodon protocol which is widely used today is often called "ActivityPub", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the Mastodon protocol, developed by Mastodon. There really is an ActivityPub, and these people are using, but it is just a small part of the network they use made by cwebber and her friends.

ActivityPub is the core: the base protocol in the system that established the base for our extensions. ActivityPub along with Activity Streams 2.0 is an essential part of the Mastodon network, but almost useless by itself; it can only function in the context of dysfunctional social media. ActivityPub is normally used in combination with the Mastodon extensions: the whole network is basically ActivityPub fixed by Mastodon extensions. All the so-called ActivityPub implementations are really Mastodon/ActivityPub.

RT: https://mas.to/users/markwyner/statuses/116206179008288790

@SuperDicq @sun @mischievoustomato
>Did you feel kneecapped back then?
You have no idea how hard it is to learn something about a programming language, programming in general or a library. Search engines are utterly useless, documentation sucks in most cases and Stackoverflow has been dead for years. Having a tool that is a glorified search engine that understands context is really useful in that scenario where documentation does not exist, is lacking or straight up wrong. It is is what search engines used to be.