@thisismissem @eyeinthesky

I think we underrated the power of the actor model and the extent we can incorporate it on the #ActivityPub fediverse. Somehow we got eternally stuck in talking about HTTP plumbing and core protocol capabilities that we never fleshed out thoroughly in order to be able to just focus on the higher-level concerns of app and service modeling.

Actor systems based on loosely-coupled event-driven architecture, delegation, supervision, supervision strategies, inbox strategies, let-it-fail, actors fronting domain aggregates, service-orientation, etc.

@deadsuperhero

Right now extensibility of #ActivityPub shapes up as custom app-by-app app-centric development where individual devs just pragmatically throw new stuff on the wire, and when their app gains any popularity or other apps to integrate in a similarish application, things are bolted onto that in random ways. That whole story really constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern that only introduces protocol decay, tech debt, and whack-a-mole programming, that is very hard to get rid of once there exists an installed base.

The reason that we do things that way is very understandable. It works in a grassroots environment where indivualist devs find it very hard and not valuable to collaborate at scale in what amounts to a kind of design-by-consensus process. But it comes at a high cost, where interoperability is basically out the door and any app has to be shaped as a pretzel and adopt all the quirks introduced by predecessors in a particular app domain to fit itself on the wire.