Tonight I set aside some time to listen to @johnonolan@mastodon.xyz on @mike@flipboard.social’s DotSocial podcast.

A lot a lot a lot of what John says mirrors the very same potential that many ActivityPub devs see as well. There are far too many points in that podcast that made me nod my head in agreement (and wish I was a third guest too!), but there was one that was incredibly timely:

Mike: … you’ve been thinking about actually embedding the whole article in the ActivityPub post, which is a mind-blowing thing… it’s not a link to something else… the whole article is in the post. John: Yes, this is something that makes perfect sense but is somehow completely new, which is weird… Mike: You can have formatted text… images? video? John: ActivityPub is fairly agnostic, you could in theory shove almost anything into it. The question is what is the client on the other side prepared to receive? Do they have some way to display it? John: If we get platforms in the ActivityPub network to start innovating with content types, it might cause those things to be adopted and it might drive the standard and what it is possible to display

Emphasis mine.

John, Mike, this is almost word-for-word exactly what the Forum and Threaded Discussions working group has been working towards! The main problem is we need buy-in from implementers to push this forward.

We can do this, we can send richer HTML across the protocol in such a way that all those things you two mentioned — in-line images, embedded videos, tables, etc. — can all show up as intended by the sender.

We’ve got commitment from (but not limited to) representatives from NodeBB, Discourse, and WordPress, and having Ghost and Flipboard sign on would help push this forward just that much more.

Let’s do this, let me get you caught up with the state of the protocol re: the Article object type. Let’s chat (but publicly, since I can’t receive DMs here on NodeBB).