CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@sl007 @julian I admit I didn't pay attention to immers at the time - I don't play games, not even chess. I was just using chess as an example, didn't mean to trigger anyone's trauma!

Still, it kinda proves my point. You have to use standard AS vocabulary because Mastodon, and if you squint then sure, Travel and Arrive, why not? But given some of the conversations I've seen on this forum, I shudder to think how that would go down if you tried to get approval for that usage from "the community" first.

@julian I don't know as much as I'd like about AT Lexicons. That is, not so much how they work, but what the grand idea is? I don't even understand if Bluesky imagines them being mixed and matched JSON-LD style. I think not?

@hongminhee @julian I'm a true believer in RDF from back in the day, so I'm hardly neutral. But...

There are essentially no interesting ActivityPub extensions right now. Even Evan's chess example, no-one's actually using AP to play chess. It's just ActivityStreams + a few cute tricks now and then. Even if there were extensions, existing AP servers chop off and throw away data they don't understand. so none of these extensions could work.

I feel like most of the "WTF am I learning JSON-LD for" criticisms are coming from this status quo. That includes "if someone wants to add a gallery thing or whatever, can't they make a FEP?" The way things work now, your extension either a) works only in your software or b) has to be painfully negotiated with the whole community. We're all gonna have a big fight about it on this forum anyway. Let's not pretend JSON-LD helps us.

But if we add two things to the mix, the situation looks different. Those are 1. server software that "keeps all the bits", and 2. a whitelabel extensible app. That would make it very easy to spin up crazy new experiences for a sizeable existing userbase. Developers should not be forced to endure a FEP process, and they should not have to attract a userbase from nothing. They should be able to just build, without even worrying if they're stepping on toes. And of course, Fedify and libraries in other languages are a load-bearing part of that world, including enforcement of the JSON-LD rules.

That world does not exist at all today, but JSON-LD does, so it's pretty valid to describe this design as premature optimisation. I dunno though, we don't seem that far away.