First good night’s sleep ive had in weeks. I suddenly woke up and realized all the items that need fixing in AP, and for the most part, how to fix them. I need to write this up before I forget. I came to a conclusion that it’s going to be really hard to fix AP in the 1.x branch, especially within the current process. This conversation yesterday between Tim Berners-Lee and Sarven (Linked data notifications) about the new w3c notifications system solidified it for me: We are going to need a...

We are going to need an Activity Pub 2.0 which fixes the major pain points in the eco system. It must be backward compatible with 1.x, but will introduce new, more scalable, extensible, interoperable ways of doing things for a larger federation and ecosystem. Systems using 1.x can signal it, and those using 2.0 should accept 1.x activities. Those using 2.x can run an upgraded protocol, and when signaling has reached a certain threshold, the old 1.x API can be sunset.

I think the first task on this track is to broadly outline the high level areas that need an upgrade, before drilling into the details. Split AP into its logical functions e.g. identity, payload, discovery, serializations (including parsing), namespacing, ontologies, authentication, signatures, c2s/s2s, large media types, version signalling, extensibility, authorization etc.

Different people will want to work on different things, so maybe the first step is to poll people to see what they want, what are the pain points, and then propose a new spec that gets most of it in.