Hi Alice!
I really think the ActivityPub and Solid projects are very complementary and we should work together.
Yes! I agree completely.
Is there anyone in the ActivityPub community following Solid or interested in doing so?
I am! I am also working on an ActivityPub server that implements a Linked Data Platform: https://gitlab.com/openengiadina/cpub
There is another project working on similar ideas: https://www.virtual-assembly.org/semapps/ (cc @srosset81).
I agree that the Solid specifications are very much work in progress. There is however the Linked Data Platform specification that is released: https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/. The Solid specifications are extensions to this.
As an interesting note. ActivityPub uses LDP. The inbox
property is the same as the LDP inbox
. From the ActivityStreams JSON-LD context:
"inbox": {
"@id": "ldp:inbox",
"@type": "@id"
},
Linked Data can seem scary and it has become complicated by the years of academization, but the core ideas are pretty simple and neat. I think it is a very good data model for decentralized systems.
Shameless plug: I wrote an small introduction to Linked Data and the Semantic Web which I hope would make the whole topic a bit more approachable: https://inqlab.net/2019-11-19-a-primer-on-the-semantic-web-and-linked-data.html