[whyrusleeping]

Activitypub is a pretty dated standard thats really not super easy to work with or adapt to a more open network. Its an XML based protocol that bakes in really difficult to use notions of identity and doesn't address the problem of data ownership in a meaningful way. From what I've been seeing, the bluesky team has been working closely with the activitypub developers on figuring out 'what comes next'.

[Karrot_Kream]

It (well its predecessor) was an XML based protocol a long time ago, but hasn't been in practice in years. Mastodon, which really popularized ActivityPub, uses JSON-LD. But yes, the ideas of data ownership and identity are just not well specified in ActivityPub. There's work in trying to incorporate capability-based security into ActivityPub but it is a large pain point right now. The protocol also has very varying amounts of uptake. Mastodon and Pleroma mostly implement the ActivityPub server-to-server API and only a handful of ActivityPub implementations support the client-to-server API. I would love to see further work between the Bluesky and AP teams on coming up with a new standard which addresses the flaws in the current protocol.