"Evolving ActivityPub to reduce infrastructure costs"

This was brought up by somebody as a subject to talk about in the questionnaire we ask for FediForum [1] attendees when they sign up.

Looking at real-world messages as they are being sent around today, I sympathize with this comment. I suspect it would be easily possible to reduce message length by 50%, even without compression, just by avoiding redundancies.

Random example from my Mastodon outbox:

      "published": "2023-03-14T17:44:24Z",
      "to": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
      ],
...
      "object": {
        "id": "https://social.coop/users/J12t/statuses/110022876518950247",
        "type": "Note",
...
        "published": "2023-03-14T17:44:24Z",
        "to": [
          "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
        ],

Without changing anything, really, just documenting the right defaults would reduce the two “to” entries and the two “published” entries to one each.

I don’t know whether the particular individual had other things in mind beyond message size reduction.

But IMHO it would be worthwhile to look at ActivityPub from the perspective of efficiency as well in future work. Maybe make a list of potential candidates in the meantime?

Best,



Johannes Ernst
Blog: https://reb00ted.org/
FediForum: https://fediforum.org/
Dazzle: https://dazzle.town/



[1] https://fediforum.org/ — online, 2 half days, end of the month, you are all invited :-) Disclaimer: I am a co-organizer.