this is gonna sound ridiculous but you can do activitypub over activitypub, and in fact you might want to — okay hear me out. the real problem is that there’s no clear boundaries on what a server might do versus what a client might do. this means that for anything the server can’t do, the client might do the same thing but in a roundabout way. example: a client can Create a Collection and manually Add to it while handling a Follow activity. this is in effect a client-managed followers collection

this becomes useful for allowing the outside world to Follow any object, even ones that the server doesn’t directly manage. really, the missing abstraction here is the concept of things being “server-managed”. by default, an AP server can manage followers collections for you, the actor. but it might not auto-track every single created object by those actors; it might only track one level of children. in other words, the Service tracks a Person, but the Person can manually track a Conversation…