ActivityPub being treated as JSON is a good thing.
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Some of us are old enough to remember RSS and blogs.
Some of us are old enough to remember the absurd levels of hype that blogs and RSS attracted — similar to the modern AI hype and recent crypto hype. During that era, it felt like everyone any their pet cat wanted a blog with an RSS feed. During that era, there was a get-rich-quick fever around blogs and RSS.
Web-Browsers even added built-in support for RSS.
ActivityPub being treated as JSON is a good thing.
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There are different version of RSS.
Most people who know of RSS (if they even know it at all) know of RSS 2.0. But, it wasn't the only version of RSS.
(RSS isn't even the first technology of its kind.)
When the online developer community became aware of RSS, there was a fight between two version of RSS:
RSS 1.0 versus RSS 2.0
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ActivityPub being treated as JSON is a good thing.
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It would be reasonable for anyone to assume that RSS 2.0 is a newer version of RSS 1.0. And there were many who tried to promote that view.
But, really they were completely different formats.
The "RSS" in 1.0 and 2.0 didn't even stand for the same thing.
1.0 RSS = RDF Site Summary / Rich Site Summary
2.0 RSS = Really Simple Syndication
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ActivityPub being treated as JSON is a good thing.
4/
RSS 2.0 won the RSS war.
I think the reason RSS 2.0 beat RSS 1.0 is because the RDF-based syntax of RSS 1.0 made it complex. It made it too complex.
While both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 were XML-based, RSS 2.0 wasn't RDF-based. RSS 2.0's syntax was much similar and easier to understand.
I think that was a big reason why RSS 2.0 won — it had a better developer user-experience.
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ActivityPub being treated as JSON is a good thing.
5/
JSON-LD has similar complexity to RDF. They are actually related formats.
ActivityPub uses JSON-LD, and thus has the potential for the same type of developer user-experience problems as RSS 1.0.
But I think ActivityPub is its own "RSS 2.0".
Why‽ Because people can and do treat ActivityPub as JSON (rather than JSON-LD).
That is a strength. It makes ActivityPub much simpler and easier to understand than JSON-LD.
@reiver I wish we could have a streamlined ActivityPub spec that removed JSON-LD. Many ActivityPub clients just treat responses as plain JSON anyway. As you noted, it adds RDF-like complexity for (my opinion) not much benefit. But I think this is unlikely to change and probably not worth a fight over.