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silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social (2026-06-14 20:52:07)
I've been reviewing the new FEP from the Mastodon team today, and one thing that caught my attention is the use of Accept and Reject activities for managing approvals. Another day, someone proposed to use Follow activity for "watching a thread".
So now, when you receive a standard activity, you need to use increasingly complicated heuristics to figure out what the activity does, because it is not possible to infer that from its type anymore.
This has to stop. I think we need to start giving our activities better names.
#ActivityPub
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Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org (2026-06-14 21:04:49)
@silverpill
>And one thing that caught my attention is the use of Accept and Reject activities for managing approvals.
This is an ActivityPub issue more than anything else. The "spec" is clear that the side-effects are to be determined by the type of the Object. There is no other indication, you effectively must check the type of the Object referenced. And I think that is correct, the same way Mastodon is correct in its usage of these two Activity types.
If you split the type for other Accept/Reject Activities, like AcceptFeatured or whatever, you are still left with more type determining logic anyway [at least in function non-pattern matching languages :)]. You just moved it somewhere else instead.
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lain, author of the quixote@lain@lain.com (2026-06-14 21:07:32)
@phnt @silverpill looking forward to the first activity with an array of types targeting an object with an array of types
silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social (2026-06-14 21:13:01)
@phnt With AcceptFeatured you don't need to determine anything. Because the object type is right here in the activity name