I think the author commits the fallacy of assuming the whole fediverse ecosystem suffers Mastodon’s foibles. The most important of them - which the author notes - is that objects’ IRIs are not treated as the identifiers themselves, but are being “built” based on some heuristics.
Indeed, almost every application that tries to be Mastodon compatible is propagating the same bad practice and resulting in headaches for everyone that tries to do it better.
Treating the ActivityPub hierarchy as a document store would make it much easier for everyone to maintain good URL hygiene.
My preferred solution to this would be that the different ActivityPub implementations had a common export/import format and rendered the URLs at their old location. The format could even just be the ActivityPub data itself, as sent to other federated servers.
I think the author commits the fallacy of assuming the whole fediverse ecosystem suffers Mastodon’s foibles. The most important of them - which the author notes - is that objects’ IRIs are not treated as the identifiers themselves, but are being “built” based on some heuristics.
Indeed, almost every application that tries to be Mastodon compatible is propagating the same bad practice and resulting in headaches for everyone that tries to do it better.
Treating the ActivityPub hierarchy as a document store would make it much easier for everyone to maintain good URL hygiene.
My preferred solution to this would be that the different ActivityPub implementations had a common export/import format and rendered the URLs at their old location. The format could even just be the ActivityPub data itself, as sent to other federated servers.