Re: AS2/AP tasks for a chartered social web working group

This may be a heretical question, but here it comes:

> On Sep 15, 2023, at 08:54, James <jamesg@jamesg.blog> wrote:
> 
> I am in full agreement with regard to maintaining existing specifications being a primary focus of the group. To be clear, this would be:
> 
> ActivityPub
> ActivityStreams
> Linked Data Notifications
> Micropub
> Webmention
> WebSub
Historically, I can understand that all these specs ended up in the same WG — it didn’t know exactly what sausage it would make when it started, and only by starting down the road did it eventually find out.

However, today we know that the ActivityPub stack, and the IndieWeb/Webmention stack, by and large are entirely independent of each other. While there is some code that implements both (notably brid.gy), there are no actual cross-dependencies that I’m aware of. E.g., to my knowledge, nobody sends ActivityStreams over Webmention.

Would it make more sense to charter two separate groups? In my view, this would help in several ways:

* More focus and less distraction for each group
* Higher ability to attract contributors. If I’m interested in Stack X and not in Stack Y, I’m much more likely to spend an hour in a meeting that only talks about Stack X, than in one that spends half of its time on a Stack I’m not interested in.
* It would reduce potential tension in the group(s) that, based on my (not-first-hand by any stretch) understanding, were, shall we say, a limiting factor in the past in the social WG.

Cheers,



Johannes.

Johannes Ernst

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