ActivityPub Experimentation: Towards AP v2

[how]

Quoting from the merged https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/getting-extensions-into-the-activitystreams-2-0-namespace/1001:

@rhiaro

There have been multiple attempts at a process for getting well-used extensions into the official ActivityStreams 2.0 namespace - doing so helps with discoverability and interop, as people can use each others extension terms, rather than reinventing things over and over. But none of the processes proposed could get consensus, and so nothing has been formalised.

I’m invested in this because there is a property used by mastodon that the DID WG also want to use that we need to see in the namespace , but also because it’d be nice if extensions work properly for everyone.

A lightweight process could be something like:

1. Two or more implementations are sharing a term (either a property or activity/object type), and using it in the same way.
2. An agreed definition is written up in some sort of authoritative document - another W3C spec, a CG report, or something else stable and persistent (and ideally versioned).
3. A PR is made to the AS2 namespace to add the link and JSON-LD context definition.
4. The SocialCG convenes a meeting to agree to merge the PR, or if there are changes that would improve the status of the extension so it can be merged, or if there is some reason to definitely not merge it (eg. it is offensive, deliberately misleading, violates someone else’s copyright, the definition really doesn’t make sense, etc).

I’d love to hear from others, particularly those of you who are using your own vocabularies to complement AS2.