Desired changes for a future revision of ActivityPub and ActivityStreams

A few of mine:

  1. Formally specify that “updated” is intended to be a machine-readable field that’s useful for “most recent wins” conflict resolution. That is, if you receive two different versions of the same object, you should keep the one with the most recent “updated” timestamp. I’m pretty sure Mastodon does this already, so hopefully this won’t be controversial.
  2. Formally specify how URLs with fragment IDs should be resolved.
  3. The sharedInbox mechanism would be more useful if it had a way to say “deliver to these specific recipients”, rather than making the receiver try to work it out from the addressing fields (without any knowledge of which recipients may have already been handled). Basically the same thing as the “envelope recipients” in SMTP. I’m not sure how best to add this - maybe a HTTP header, a new “Deliver” activity, or something else.
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