Re: Should the specs be forked and maintained elsewhere?

On Thu, 2023-03-23 at 10:53 -0500, a wrote:
> AS3 and AP2 seem wholly unnecessary without concrete proposals on
> what such specs would include that isn't already covered by existing
> specs.
> 
> However, I do agree that vocabulary acceptance is something that has
> been a historical challenge. Within the FEP process, we've had a
> proposal to use w3id.org/fep as a namespace for extension terms, and
> some years before that we had terms unofficially grafted onto the as:
> namespace -- Hashtag, manuallyApprovesFollowers, movedTo, sensitive.
> Therefore it would be helpful if:
> 
> 1) there was a move to adopt some or all of these unofficial terms as
> officially part of the namespace

Agreed, we can't break existing software for the sake of a fork. It'd
be a disadvantage to the larger community and would also look this
group look very immature.

> 2) additional guidance or mechanisms were given to the community to
> extend AS2 via JSON-LD without having their own "vendor", or doing so
> in a "vendor-independent" way

For those reading, not only is this possible today but is one of the
underutilized parts of ActivityStreams2 (only by those choosing not to
do so, Mastodon has and been able to build a moat of sorts).

> 2.5) such extensions were formally managed by an "activitystreams
> standards foundation" similar to the XSF. if this is not done, i
> suspect the FEP process will continue as-is regardless and
> effectively fill this role ad-hoc, but some formal recognition and
> participation might be nice assuming we avoid corporate capture of
> the process.

I strongly agree with the need of an equivalent to the XSF - that'd
make the W3C meeting space just a way for the public to engage if
they're coming from a software or standards side.