Book Review: ActivityPub by Evan Prodromou ★★★★⯪

As part of my grant from NLnet to improve my Fediverse bot project, I'm spending time making sure I understand all the fundamentals of ActivityPub. The problem with Internet standards is they're scattered all over the place. Abandoned forums, half-maintained wikis, mailing lists with obscure rules, and monolithic blocks of text. Sometimes you just want one book which collates all the info and presents it in a consistent format. This is nearly that book. Evan Prodromou has the unenviable task of making the whole ecosystem easy to understand. Thankfully he does that well. Things are logically laid out, there are comprehensive descriptions of even the most obscure parts of the spec, and it builds up nicely from the fundamentals. Oh, it's also surprisingly light-hearted. This principle is so important and long-winded that web architects have given it an acronym, HATEOAS. (We often pronounce it “HATE-ee-OH-us,” which sounds like a breakfast cereal nobody wants to eat. This is one reason…