Yes, that might work. Note having an agreed upon and well-defined constraint to its formatting, and a more general-purpose Article lacking that constraint.
For both types we should beware how base type definitions may or may not affect extended types. I think it not well defined what happens in terms of behavior for extended and/or multi-types (think e.g. "type": ["as:Note", "my:StickyNote"]).
Golden Hammer: Article versus Note?
This section is a bit of an aside, not directly related to the FEP. Yet relates to the overall design direction of AS/AP and how that may cause new trouble in the future as things are adopted by the installed base.
Wikipedia quote: “[Golden hammer is] the comfort zone state where you don’t change anything to avoid risk. The problem with using the same tools every time you can is that you don’t have enough arguments to make a choice because you have nothing to compare to and is limiting your knowledge.”
For Article schema.org suggests the following meaningful sub-types.
- Article
And I copied that whole list because in AS/AP land by default the urge is to try to hammer every information model in the limited set of objects and activities that ActivityStreams provides, and not touch the whole extensibilty mechanism of the protocol specification.
As I see it AS only provides the toolbox of basic primitives to build from, but it is the extension mechanism where real domains are modeled for rich social networking use cases. We should go past the everything-is-a-note-or-it-doesnt-work-with-mastodon rule, but also not end up with everything-is-either-note-or-article-or-you-are-on-your-own.
Had schema.org been incorporated somehow in AS/AP we might have avoided the “if we only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Software > NodeBB and Software > Discourse would be building interoperable DiscussionForumPosting and Software > WordPress would have support for BlogPosting. Maybe Software > Lemmy being a link aggregator may add support for Review and its subtypes.
The true power of the social web does not come from cramming society into a one-size-fits-all model, but instead to facilitate an ever growing support for interoperable (app-independent) domain designs. To move towards a heterogeneous social web. So imho..
Microblogging
Forums crammed into microblogging
Media publishing crammed into microblogging
Forge federation means it microblogs
The direction to follow is for AS/AP to become more meaningful standards again wrt their promise of universal social networking. It means that we should step off of the Mastodon-first approach, and turning any social app into a microblogging app to then extend. The standards movement must find its own healthy path again.
AS/AP has huge flexibility. It’s extension mechanism should be its strength, not its weakness. We must focus more on it, or AS/AP is doomed in protocol decay hell. It is meaningless if a project says “We are now fediverse-enabled”. It is like saying “we have an internet connection”.
Instead a project should say “We added Fediverse Microblogging support” or “Task management” support, or “Code reviewing” (better than the not-so-clear “forge federation” umbrella term).
Update copied from this toot:
The versatility of the Linked Data standards that AS/AP is based on is such that specific data models for any social networking use case can be defined.
While LD is suited as storage format for the social / knowledge graph, it is not out-of-the-box a good fit for the AS/AP extension mechanism. Using closed-world models based on strategic design (part of domain-driven design) would be best to define the interoperable msg exchange patterns that occur between actors.