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Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to start sounding like a broken record, but I find it peculiar this project claims RSS didn't go far enough, then it creates a short-circuited implementation when the actual went-very-far progression for decentralized information, something like RSS-XML-FOAF-RDF-Linked-Data-Solid, uses well established and open ended schemas for much more than this project's basics. With decentralized identifiers (DIDs), it will work on blockchains too. Fine, make a million different decentralized systems, but why not just use LD in a basic way so it's not just creating more fragmentation?

In following Solid, I've noticed a lot of decentralized projects are interested and adapting to its approach.

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We're still building out schemas, so I wouldn't rate the protocol based on the current number. I just didn't want to speculatively add a bunch without having the live system to test against.

If I thought any of the existing standards were winners, I would've gone with them. If you really want to get mad, you can read why I decided not to use RDF or JSON-LD: https://unwalled.garden/docs/why-not-rdf

But this is why libraries are written. As you use each schema (using json-ld, or turtle, or whatever), wrap it with a library, and it becomes as easy to work with as anything. And you're adding to the critical mass of a read-write "web." Programmers need to work with the data and schemas occasionally, everyone else, forever. You've exchanged YAGNI with NIH. Unless you just expect to gain a critical mass, or don't care about participating in that web.

It really doesn't become as easy to work with. You still have to wrangle around the RDF "everything is a triple and attributes are URLs" concept, and even if you hid all that away you'd be attempting to gain something as simple as this design is. We just need a way to share & publish objects which link to each other. We don't need the graph model.

Quite a fan of your work with beaker, so curious how this will pan out.

Activitypub implementations seem to fare mostly fine by ignoring that ActivityStreams2 technically is JSON-LD, using it as "just JSON". Curious if you have any particular points against it (I can imagine a few, but would be interested in your take on it).

The main reason I didn't use AP is that it's designed for federated servers and uses a mailboxes network which doesn't fit with Dat & P2P. We may find a way to interop, but it'll require some kind of bridge service, and I didn't really see the point of adopting their schemas if it didn't buy us interop automatically.

Edit: also, thanks!

Coming up with yet another format in that space makes that kind of bridge service more annoying to create though, especially if the format grows more complicated. E.g. just trying to bridge a few of the existing choices like Atom, AS2 and microformats has an annoying amount of edge cases.

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