JackbyDev

Does it need to be better? Can people just share things they find interesting or that they made?

Then go complain somewhere else, you asked for an explanation of how it works.

It’s because it’s JSON-LD.

I don’t understand the comment. It’s like calling the fact that firstName is in the JSON {"firstName": "Bob"} “over engineered bullshit” when they should’ve made some application specific protocol instead of using JSON. ActivityStreams and ActivityPub are built on top of JSON-LD to utilize existing libraries to represent linked data (that’s what the LD is). To specify what schemas are used there is a “context” field. There are other schemas as well. Take a look at https://schema.org/ to see them.

If it feels over engineered it’s because it’s meant to be able to represent a wide variety of types of social media and typical interactions with them. I seriously doubt Mastodon (micro blogging) and Lemmy (link aggregation forum) would be able to interact easily if they weren’t “over engineered”.

Because it is JSON-LD and that’s how JSON-LD works. It’s an extensible format. Similar to XML namespaces.

It helps when you understand that you only ever directly interact with your instance.

• Alice posts to A (in some community hosted on B)
• B is federated with A so will eventually receive the post
• C is federated with B so will eventually get the post