Developer of ActivityPub-based micro-blogging and content subscription platform Mitra. Working on Fediverse standards: https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps
By separating core protocol requirements and optional features.
The guide has a section titled “Protocol features”:
This is a place where information about optional features is collected, and soft deletion FEP could be mentioned there. A formal specification could be structured in a similar way.
>Currently it’s hard to read, there is no single document. No single source of truth.
We can make it happen.
I am currently working on this: https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/guide.md. It’s a guide for developers, but in the future it may be used as a base for a more formal specification.
I don’t know much about recent developments, but the early version of the protocol had several major flaws:
- Identity is based on a non-rotatable key, other types of identity are not supported.
- No privacy without encryption.
- Media attachments are not supported, all images are stored on a single server.
- Servers only store data and don’t do anything else, so they get abstracted away and everyone uses the same 5 relays (in Fediverse each server has a personality, and that creates a strong incentive to self-host).
There are also many minor things that I dislike, for example the use of numbers instead of human-readable names, unusual cryptography and so on.