idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something). it’s what you might call a “hot take”, certainly a heterodox one to some parts of the broader #fediverse community. this is in response to recent discussion on “what do you want to see from AP/AS2 specs” (in context of wg rechartering) mostly devolving into people complaining about JSON-LD and extensibility, some even about namespacing in general (there was a suggestion to use UUID vocab terms. i’m not joking)
1/?
now at this point you’re probably wondering what this has to do with social networking. and on a practical level, if you’re just interested in building a “social networking protocol”, this is mostly all extraneous.
the part that implementers have to deal with is the notion of “context” and, more specifically, how json-ld handles it, and even more specifically, what to do when two shorthand terms conflict.
remember, the open-world solution is namespacing. what does closed-world do?
18/?
well, let’s look at
actor. in AS2 terms it refers to the entity that performed an activity. but in schema.org terms it refers to someone playing a role in a movie or other performance.in a closed-world sense, you don’t want to be aware of context. you don’t want to have to deal with it. but even so, you still have an “implicit context” that you are using, based on how you define each term in your own understanding, what you hardcode into your software.
19/?
what json-ld does, or what it allows you to do, is explicitly declare a
@context@mastodon.socialthat is equivalent to your “implicit context”.this works fine if there is only one declaration that is shared exactly between two parties, but it gets complicated when the “implicit context” differs or isn’t an exact match.
this means that there cannot ever be a singular #fediverse network, because the “implicit context” differs between each software project. the only guaranteed overlap is the AS2 one.
20/?
but it’s not like AS2 didn’t think of this. they wrote in this requirement: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/#extensibility
> Activity Streams 2.0 implementations that wish to fully support extensions MUST support Compact URI expansion as defined by the JSON-LD specification.
note, you aren’t required to implement all of json-ld. you just need to handle the bit where you can identify the equivalence between a uri and some arbitrary string.
but #fediverse mostly decided this is too hard, and ignore context.
21/?
now there’s a few thoughts i have here:
#fediverse culturally seems to ignore a lot of other things as well. they ignore http caching for example. they ignore http status codes like 301 Permanent Redirect. these requirements are arguably more important than context, and they still get ignored.
in fact, most fedi software is mostly just reimplementing Web browsers, but with what they consider to be the “bare minimum” of compliance. and the web they let you browse is smaller than the Web
22/?
are these things part of the “protocol”? how far does the “protocol” extend to cover? because, as we established, #ActivityPub is not enough to build a fully functional #fediverse – and a lot of extensions and additional specs are things that ought to be included in this “protocol”, insofar as this “protocol” is desirable.
the other thought:
if you ignore things, that means there are cases you’re not handling, losing out on robustness. ignoring context is to ignore shared understanding.
23/?
so what do you actually lose out on when you ignore json-ld context?
you first have to fall back to the “implicit context”, where AS2 terms are generally agreed upon, but nothing else is guaranteed.
take something like
discoverablefrom mastodon. what does it mean? well, it means whatever is defined in the mastodon codebase and documentation. so we could represent that as http://joinmastodon.org/ns#discoverable or shorten that with a prefix. but if we do, then most #fediverse will choke on that.24/?
this is because #fediverse is ignoring context. the implicit context is that
discoverablemeans<http://joinmastodon.org/ns#discoverable> but they don’t know that. so they can’t actually handle the extension in its fullest form.what AS2 calls out as “full support for extensions” requires being able to identify this equivalence and handle it. again, fedi does… let’s call it “partial support”.
the “implicit context” is now a hardcoded but unstated requirement of this “protocol”.
25/?
which is to say: #fediverse software generally expects LD-aware producers to compact against their own “implicit context”, but they don’t always define that context. it’s left undeclared and undefined. or it actually *is* declared, but if you give them their own expanded form then they’ll not understand it.
it’s like someone saying hey, when i say “knows”, i mean “is familiar with”
and then you say “john is familiar with sally”
and they respond WTF? what does “is familiar with” mean?
26/?