This great post from @erincandescent should be mentioned here (as:copyOfPost: The ActivityPub Panel)
One thing that I think is key but maybe not obvious from the spec: The AP Client-to-Server API isn’t just aimed at mobile or desktop apps. That’s the obvious and straightforward use case, but not the only one.
What the C2S API gives you is delegation. It lets some other agent - which might be a mobile app, or might be a web app - act on your behalf. And, importantly, it gives those agents effectively equal power to the server itself has.
In the extreme, you could have a server which has no UI of its own - it only exposes ActivityStreams JSON. Maybe not the most user friendly, but permitted.
With the C2S spec you can build a PeerTube which acts as a true adjunct to your “primary” AP server - you upload videos to it, but they get posted to your main identity hosted elswhere. Thinking about things on-the-wire, you can envisage an entry in your outbox which might look like
{
"id": "https://example.com/me/activity293048",
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://example.com/me/",
"object": {
"id": "https://peertube.example.com/me/video/3",
...
},
...
}
AP C2S allows an additional degree of federation and decentralisation. And it doesn’t involve e.g. PeerTube giving up features either - it can still give you a timeline and all of those sorts of things
Some of the difficulty comes from the world and mental models that exist. In the Q&A, Chris commented on the trouble he had convincing any of the existing social networks to come to the SocialWG, and commented on the interoperability troubles we might have had trying to bring the existing worlds (the “old guard” of federated social networks, almost) together.
In some ways, I think Mastodon is the “last of the old guard”. Mastodon’s data model isn’t (or wasn’t) ActivityStreams, and its’ worldview isn’t the same either. They’re building something which follows the same basica model as Twitter (With their own twist), and that’s fine, but it’s intentionally limited.
However, when that intentionally limited implementation is 90% of the population of your network, it can colour perceptions of it. ActivityPub can support things wildly different from Mastodon, but when people think ActivityPub they also think Mastodon-likes. Some of the functionality can cause interoperability issues also. However, just in terms of the major proprietary social networks, there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from building something in the model of Facebook or Google+, or any number of other designs on top of it. And in terms of something much older, you should totally be able to have an ActivityPub enabled blog and you should also be able to blend all of these things together into one cohesive whole.
Systems built since tend to target AP directly, and have data models which more directly correspond to AS2 and its functionality. It would be a lot easier for these to implement the AP C2S spec, and it would be a great world where things did.
(In case my comments above might be misinterpreted: I do think that Mastodon adopting AP is perhaps the best thing that has happened to the spec; without it, the AP fediverse would almost certainly be a lot smaller and less successful. So while I lament here some of the downsides of having Mastodon as the “de facto standard” AP implementation, I’m still thankful for it. If we’d have built the most elegant social networking protocol in the world but there had been nobody to talk to, it would have all been for naught)