My priorities for revising AP and AS2

One question that came up on the Social Web Community Group is what exactly
this WG should do with the ActivityPub and Activity Streams specifications.
I don't think that's up to me, but I wanted to share some priorities I have.

- Backwards compatibility. Implementations of .1 version should
interoperate with implementations of .0 versions.
- Clarity. Some of the sections of AP and AS2 are hard to read. It would be
nice to focus on what's important in the section. We also use some vague,
undefined terms.
- Explicitness. Some behaviours on the ActivityPub network, such as
maintaining the `replies` collection, are not described explicitly in any
of the documents.
- Specificity. We could really help implementers by getting more specific
on how to apply optional properties to AS2 objects.
- Fallback representations. If a consumer receives an activity it doesn't
recognize, how can it represent the activity to a user? There
are properties specifically to help with this.
- Authorization model. We should document the (admittedly loose)
authorization model for reading, writing, and interacting with ActivityPub
objects.
- Connection with other standards. Webfinger, HTTP Signature, and OAuth are
all pretty instrumental to AP implementations. We should at least mention
them in the spec, and possibly include profiles for their use.
- Extensibility to new application areas. We should make it clearer how to
use the AS2 and AP building blocks to create new kinds of applications on
top of the social API and federation protocol.

Here are some important things I'd like to avoid:

- Required features that are too resource-intensive for small servers, such
as handling terabytes of data.
- Required features that are too inefficient to implement at large scale.
- Required features that are too complex for small development teams to
implement.
- Restrictions that block innovation and experimentation.
- Models that don't recognize the diversity of humans on the network, and
in particular that preclude different privacy needs or relationship types.

I hope that's helpful and informs some of our conversation.

Evan