After 2 years of having this idea, I’ve come back to it with some new tools and mindset. Want to see what other think about it before I dive deep…! I believe ActivityPub can really open up the web unlike some other suggestions. Combined with a battle-tested message management system (email clients), I can envision a web where everything can be subscribed to or discussed, each in a way individuals want!
The idea sounds interesting, but I think that involving mail specifications will both complicate and limit what you’ll be able to achieve. (I’m saying this as someone that is already involved in developing ActivityPub applications)
As an immediate limitation that I can see, there is the difference that email clients are focused on a user’s inbox, while ActivityPub allows for access to a multitude of collections (inboxes, outboxes, followers collections, likes, samd), including other users’. I’m not sure how you can overcome this, or if you want to really.
Despite that, I am looking forward to see what you can actually develop and I hope you’ll prove me wrong. :) If you’re looking for libraries to use ActivityPub from, I will humbly suggest the ones I’ve been working on for quite some time for the Go programming language: https://github.com/go-ap
Yeah, having them as separate mailboxes will not be as useful as integrating them directly with the messages they’re associated with. I’m open to ideas!
Each follow can be an email in a followers mailbox
Ooh, you are hitting one of my pet offline-first fantasies here: Email (and mastodon posts) should be fetched in the background and stored on disk. I want to read and post as I please and it should flow out when I am back online.
I am looking forward to see what you come up with.