lumpen 🍉 III (@scrum)

@0x4d6165 well i think json is a helluva lot easier to parse than XML lmao, and I am an xml enthusiast, but trying to do server to server or client to server stuff in xml is not a good idea, xml is better suited for relatively static documents or one way publishing like rss/atom feeds, and that's probably what held back early attempts at decentralized social media is how janky xml can be, like diaspora or OStatus are largely xml based using the cursed and now abandoned Salmon protocol

i think activityPub stands on the shoulders of giants as there was a solid decade+ of web ontology development that was basically abandoned around 2012-14 because the tech oligarchs didn't think it was going anywhere, the only people interested in semantics n such in the 2010's were indie web people

i didn't know parsing json-ld was a hassle in other languages, i'm sorry to keep shilling php here but there's this built in function json_decode() you just take a json file or string and it turns it into an array, so you just work with an array, and if you want to turn it into json again you do json_encode and that's that, like the whole backend of this forum i'm working on is just folders with json files in it until i get the sql tables figured out, even then i kinda like the flatfile json idea

Eventually what I'm working on should serve as a basis of a minimal fedi instance, i've been playing around with a bunch of old fedi backups, the weird thing i've noticed is that mastodon, pleroma/akkoma and *key variants format their fedi backups slightly differently, like the way mastodon does it is highly redundant ( the more I learn about the technical stuff, the more i hate mastodon and it's consequences )

but i'm not even gonna fuck with activitypub directly, gonna use this library which handles most of that ( landrok.github.io/activitypub/ ) and i'm basically gonna just rip off the Misskey Sql tables lol