ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences

ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences

[Eric Wong]

I've been looking into AP off and on over the last year.
While the technical side is certainly feasable,
I'm not sure how to deal with the cultural differences...


* AP allows limited HTML, sometimes sourced from Markdown;
  but <img> tags seem supported by all implementations.
  Even snac2 (a minimalist AP implementation packaged for
  Debian) supports images :<

  I expect the public-inbox audience would be repulsed by
  needless use of HTML and images in AP messages if they
  get mirrored to mailing lists...

  Mirroring + displaying user-supplied images or video isn't
  acceptable to me for legal and mental health reasons.  Not
  to mention the cost of storing these things (especially in
  git).

* line wrapping: mail users typically expect wrapping at
  a reasonable line length (e.g. 64-72 columns), and this
  is expected for git commit messages (and code) by most
  projects.

  AP (and some MUAs) expect the device to wrap, too; but
  it's probably not welcomed by most mailing list users.


* Emojis - ugh, at least Perl has charnames::viacode in the
  standard library to ASCII-fy undisplayable glyphs for terminals.
  I ended up cloning over 200MB of emoji graphics just to read
  the Python code for a JS-free AP implementation designed for
  low-power devices...


* Post vs Note - AP makes a distinction between Posts and Notes,
  with the latter being more casual (I think).  Emails don't have
  this distinction, but perhaps SSIA (Subject Says It All)
  emails would qualify as a Note.


* Quoting - seems like mainly an email thing, but I really don't
  see the point of quoting anymore given the existence of reliable
  and easily-mirrored public archives.  It's also a waste of storage,
  bandwidth and Xapian index space.


* Signatures - they're a waste of space in email, so I'm glad
  they don't seem to be a thing in AP.


Maybe some other things, too...