Discussion: Solid vs. ActivityPub

[aschrijver]

Following up to @divoplade in Solid scope and ecosystem - #34 by divoplade …

@divoplade

@aschrijver: some developers already ditched the JSON-LD compliance of the AP spec and are proponents to go with plain JSON for the entire future fediverse.

The most frequent complain I see on Mastodon is its lack for proper support of so-called Content Warnings (which are, simply put, metadata, but as plain text). The people find that the content warnings are both sometimes too specific and sometimes too vague. Does that ring a bell? What could possibly be the solution? ^^

Do you mean collapsed text reasons, where a short snippet of free text indicates what’s within that region? Like e.g. “uspol” or “rant, need coffee”? I don’t have much problem with those. There is a lot in my timeline, so I may skip opening the text region and move on, or the summary text piques my interest.

@divoplade

The fact is that the fediverse does not understand what linked data is, and what it could be used for.

That is an over-generalization. Most people on the fediverse do not need to know. There are just fediverse users. The users on the two main forums SocialHub and Feneas know very well, especially the ones involved with furthering the standard and compatibility.

But there are many individual developers and projects where they indeed do not see the benefits of linked data. The ActivityPub specification was written such that there is compliance with JSON-LD, but also compatibility with plain JSON. Anyone doing the latter will find that their app will just integrate nicely with the fediverse. Very nice for initial adoption, but if the trend continues it becomes ever harder to add the linked data special sauce.