people keep saying activitypub is email for websites but actually email is just activitypub for arbitrary messages. (yes, there was time travel involved.)

activitypub actually came first. we all used activitypub until the invention of time travel, at which point some people went back with the designs for the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which was inspired by activitypub but made more generic so it could carry any arbitrary message, not just activities. they incepted the timeline and now we live in this reality where AP was inspired by email instead of the other way around

it’s called the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol because the time travelers didn’t want all the baggage of setting up an HTTPS connection every single time they wanted to send a message. they thought they would just do raw TCP instead, plaintext instead of JSON. it worked. email is now the biggest social network in the world.

similarly, a different group of time travelers from an even more distant future came back to try to incept XMPP, but they arrived too late. the SMTP people got there first.

it’s true, you can ask @cwebber about this but she will never admit it

also all this time travel is why we still call them “timelines” to this very day instead of “feeds”

if i disappear and am never heard from again, it’s because i said too much

@trwnh IP is really just ActivityPub for packets.