activity pub is not only what happens when you let OOP people design a protocol. no the OOP try as hard as possible to make things as complicated as possible. kinda like the ITU standards, X.500 n stuff. utterly deranged.

i did ldap related things for a while which is a reduced version of X.500 and that gave me the same vibes as AP. everything reinvented from basic principles. beautiful contraptions with their own lingo and everything.

it's like if you have a box full of ultra special lego parts. they are beautiful in their right place, but without their set and the manual they are absolutely shit.

everyone does things a tad different though - the protocol is so complicated, it can't really be implemented.

to add insult to injury, the "normative" thing isn't a machine readable version, but a fucking giant free form web page. it honestly is a wonder that there is more than one implementation, and that those can speak to each other.

@bonifartius Overly complex standards are typically a sign of "design by committee" where everyone has their own pet peeve that "must" be in there.

@niclas i really don't get why this is done time after time. W3 standards are doing this, freedesktop.org does this, etc.

meanwhile the still relevant standards are one-file rfcs from like 40 years ago :)