@helge when you fully distill it, activitypub is basically just using Follow activities to request inclusion in some followers collection… and even that flow is only 80% defined since there’s no official way to remove a follower

i guess also Like/likes and Announce/shares, which hold up slightly better

then there’s the entirety of C2S which gets ignored (and has its own issues)

i think “actor” doesn’t make sense unless you can POST to outbox. everything else is generic to all resources.

@helge I mean there is a concept of an actor, that looks more like an agent, but doesn't behave like either an actor nor an agent, and if you approach it from a linked data perspective it makes no sense because it isn't a real thing, and if you approach it from an actor calculus perspective it makes no sense because it is too many things, and different projects have implemented their understanding of this differently in mutually incompatible ways that everyone will yell at you telling you that they are absolutely compatible, and…

I'll see myself out.

My gripes here are not of technical nature. The word actor suggests something that is a meaningful entity. However, ActivityPub does not turn it into a meaningful entity. With a lot of work, rendering all existing Fediverse applications incompatible to your application, you could turn Actor into a thing. Unfortunately, the ship has sailed.

@helge i’m not speaking technical either, i’m speaking conceptual. as in, the concept of an actor could be removed entirely from activitypub, since nothing actually depends on defining such a concept except for the side effects, which can be carried out either by a service or by an application, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the outside because the resulting state is the same. maybe addressability via to/cc could benefit from this concept, but it’s not defined that way…

@helge

more generally:

- *any* http/rdf resource can be followed/liked/shared as long as you know where to send the activity (POST inbox)
- *any* http/rdf resource can declare an outbox of activities that can contain arbitrary activities as published by the controller of the outbox URI. you can GET outbox and read published activities.
- you can POST to the outbox of a resource to publish activities
- you can also GET inbox to read notifications

none of this depends on actors. it’s generic.

@hrefna @helge Actor is the range of the actor property. this is a totally useful definition and not in any way immaterial. *sob*

(if you contort the concept enough, you may be able to claim that to/cc/bto/bcc/audience have a range of Actor | Collection, but the outbox delivery algorithm doesn’t care for type except Collection (which just expands inline) so technically any resource is addressable (and deliverable if it has an inbox))

no wonder people rely on webfinger!