julian on Nostr: *This is a spin-off discussion from today's ForumWG meeting* During today's ForumWG ...

*This is a spin-off discussion from today's ForumWG meeting*


During today's ForumWG meeting an interesting side discussion cropped up regarding what constitutes an Actor, and whether other object types could be considered Actor-like.


ActivityStreams defines an Actor as being one of five types:



<li>Application</li>
<li>Group</li>
<li>Organization</li>
<li>Person</li>
<li>Service</li>

However, a looser definition of an Actor could simply be "if the resolved object contains an inbox and an outbox".


Such a definition opens up the possibility of having lots of things be followable, perhaps without direct user interaction. This was one possibility outlined by Chris Moser (npub1yns…57q2)


infinite love ⴳ (npub1t5c…ppw4) also mentioned that Mastodon does not consider an object as being an actor unless it is one of those five types.


Dmitri | 🇺🇦 (npub1a72…66ak) noted that this was a topic brought up at a previous AP issue triage meeting. Could you provide a summary?


Also cc Evan Prodromou (npub1764…nuj0) for his thoughts.