Post #3153339

@Profpatsch@mastodon.xyz @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz Maybe gRPC has some mechanisms for including such negotiation, but not all languages have an implementation, whereas everyone speaks json and HTTP It does, actually. gRPC already has mechanisms for capability discovery and negotiation. What makes me uncomfortable with that argument is that it sometimes sounds very close to saying: “let us intentionally design around the lowest common denominator because it is already everywhere.” And from my perspective, that is also how technologies slowly become legacy platforms. One could argue that HTTP + JSON did not fundamentally introduce concepts that did not already exist in systems such as CORBA, or even much older enterprise protocols and distributed architectures. The tooling, accessibility, and ecosystem changed, of course, but the underlying distributed-systems problems remained remarkably similar. So my question becomes: if we are discussing how to evolve or improve ActivityPub, why are we simultaneously using arguments that implicitly push the design toward remaining permanently constrained by legacy assumptions? I am not saying that backward compatibility or accessibility are unimportant. They obviously matter. I am only questioning whether “everyone already speaks HTTP and JSON” should be treated as a sufficient architectural argument against adopting more explicit and strongly-defined federation contracts.