these are the formal definitions, yes, but implementation practice has diverged somewhat. i think “paragraph length” is a bit of a red herring, as there are Notes with multiple <p> tags in the activitystreams/pub examples. there are also Notes with names (titles). i go into this more here: Federating the content of posts (Note, Articles and character limits) - #7 by trwnh
to be honest i’m not sure why they do this. it’s not particularly “wrong”, it’s just a little weird. the thing that’s a bigger issue for federation is using Announce to wrap activities that ought to be forwarded. most other fediverse implementations operate at an object level, so Announce means sharing the object. Announcing activities as a substitute for proper inbox forwarding means that some implementations may interpret all of these Announces as separate “posts”. This is also more of an issue when you deal with the “activity stream” directly, i.e. if you were Facebook – there, an Announce Create Page" would be equivalent to saying in english “John reshared Sally’s Create” rather than “Sally created a web page” or “John reshared Sally’s web page”. bringing it back to object types though, the expectation of Page is not “a submission to a link aggregating service”. i would expect it to be reserved for actual web pages, like how Tumblr lets you create custom web pages in your blog theme editor.
so i’d say that it breaks down more like this:
- Article = formally published text, like Wordpress, typically has a title and permalink (which may be used for “conversion” logic as mastodon does currently), may be read in a feed reader or syndicated to other publishers
- Note = informal text, like a status update or chat message or forum post or a comment in a comments section, etc. Typically viewed in context of something else (e.g. some collection of Notes, like a profile page, replies collection, context collection, or so on)
- Page = structured content meant to be displayed in a web browser, e.g. Neocities, or Tumblr’s “custom pages”.
i don’t think it’s “making up standards”. i think it’s just standards. you’re not decreeing anything, you’re just describing how things ought to be done. and on an ecosystem level, you get buy-in from implementers of those standards – of which there should at least be NodeBB, Discourse, and Flarum, right? the process of standards alignment can be slow and painful, but it should be done nonetheless. the landscape right now looks like what it looks like because there hasn’t been any real protocol stewardship, and Mastodon emerged as a de facto steward of its own protocol. how we change that is by developing actual standards via FEP, WG, etc. – and then advocating other implementers use those standards for better interoperability. put another way, it’s a question of trust and authority. in the absence of a trusted authority, implementers will do whatever they want. part of the argument for activitypub as a standard is that it received w3c approval as an official Technical Recommendation. at worst, it’s a rubber stamp by one of the highest authorities of web standards. at best, it’s a foundation for sharing activity streams on the linked data web. but it takes a lot of work from implementers and alignment initiatives to make it reach that point. “if no one implements it, all you have is a spec”.
strategically, another part of “how we change that” is by making it easier for implementers doing the "wrong* thing to transition to doing the “right” thing. providing migration paths. maybe even sending them PRs, instead of waiting for them to do it. it’s outreach.