Confused by definition of alsoKnownAs

ActivityPub
1

Today, I am pondering over the alsoKnownAs predicate (in relation to my fully RDF-aware ActivityPub server Vocata).

The (tbh, non-normative) ActivityStreams ontology refers to DID Core, so I read this as the predicate being imported from there. However, looking at the DID ontology, it states that the alsoKnownAs predicate is in the ActivityStreams namespace.

How do I read this? I understand this as the predicate being under the AS namespace technically, but semantically defined in DID Core. Is this the correct interpretation?

2

Yes, and it gets a bit more confusing, because the definition adopted by DID Core conflicts with the actual implemented usage of the property by Mastodon. See Defining alsoKnownAs - #30 by trwnh for more discussion on this.

3

Yep, I saw that, and think that (once again) Mastodon is wrong.

Oh, and now I found alsoKnownAs and acct:, which is exactly the thing I am pondering right now :D.

4

I don’t think there is a wrong or right here. There is just a confusing mess, and one has to decide what is more important maximal interoperability or having a less confusing codebase.

If we had a field to list identities, we would be one step closer to being able to replace the https actor ids with dids.