Defining alsoKnownAs

ActivityPub
16

We discussed this in the SocialCG meeting today, minutes available here: Social Web Incubator CG -- 07 Nov 2020

Just to give a perspective about where the Fediverse community is here, I’d like to give an example of what I think the spec text for this might look like if it was written in a activitystreams-specific or activitypub-specific way. I’m thinking of this as kind of a “starting point” from the other side, so we can figure out what the generic definition might look like by unifying these two ideas. Please let me know if you have any feedback!

alsoKnownAs

URL: ActivityStreams 2.0 Terms

The alsoKnownAs relationship indicates that two Actor objects are shared by the same underlying user. However, care should be taken when consuming a document to make sure that the relationship is authorized by all actors involved. For example, if https://example.org/cat has "alsoKnownAs": "https://example.org/dog", then processing systems should also make sure that https://example.org/dog has "alsoKnownAs": "https://example.org/cat" before treating the relationship as valid. If the relationship is reciprocated, then the two actors may be treated as the same person for certain security-sensitive operations.

Domain: Actor
Range: Actor
Functional: false

Example

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "type": "Person",
  "id": "https://example.org/cat",
  "name": "Catrina on dot-org"
  "alsoKnownAs": "https://example.com/cat",
}

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "type": "Person",
  "id": "https://example.com/cat",
  "name": "Catrina on dot-com"
  "alsoKnownAs": "https://example.org/cat",
}