Imho, ActivityPub is a bad protocol that tries to accomplish everything, and ends up being bad at all of it. The spec is also ambiguous in a lot of areas. And major implementations don’t always follow the spec. All in all, it’s a miracle the fediverse even works as well as it does.
I didn’t say basic. I said bad. HTTP 1 is a good protocol. ActivityPub is not. Read both the specs if you don’t believe me. I have.
There’s not a single point in HTTP 1 that I thought, “what the fuck does that mean?” There are several in ActivityPub. ActivityPub also has several areas that are ambiguous. Ambiguity is bad in a specification.
ActivityPub tries to support everything, and has no defined behavior for when a client doesn’t support whatever thing it just received.
It also uses JSON-LD, which isn’t necessarily bad, but defeats the purpose of JSON by making it too complicated to easily write by hand.
This is not easy to write, read, or parse, or build:
{ "@context": { "name": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name", "homepage": { "@id": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/workplaceHomepage", "@type": "@id" }, "Person": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person" }, "@id": "https://me.example.com", "@type": "Person", "name": "John Smith", "homepage": "https://www.example.com/" }