deadsuperhero

Note: This is just an idea that I’ve been musing over for a while. No actual code or proposal exists at this time, but I’ve been considering pitching this as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal. I may be totally misguided.

---

I’ve been thinking about a long-standing problem Fediverse platforms have had for a while, and it’s kind of an annoying headache: some activity types just don’t come out looking right on particular platforms.

For example: I run an ActivityPub-enabled publication on the Fediverse, We Distribute. For the longest time, we’ve opted into federating our articles out with a designated activity type: Article! To us, as a publishing platform, this approach makes sense.

Here’s the problem, though: the biggest player in the space, Mastodon, does a poor job of supporting Article. Instead, every post Mastodon uses is instead a Note. From a semantic point of view, it might not seem like there’s a lot of difference between the two: both are effectively texts posts that can contain some formatting markup, both can hold an arbitrary amount of characters, and both can effectively be used to represent a full article.

So, what’s the big deal? The short of it is, Note has been primarily used for social statuses, and I believe that it makes sense for long-form publishing platforms to use the correct corresponding ActivityStreams vocabulary.

The Bigger Picture

Regardless of where you land on the Article vs Note question, there’s a bigger, stickier issue to be concerned with: graceful degradation of content.

Right now, if you’re using Mastodon, and you try to load a remote activity not supported by Mastodon, this is what happens:

1. A remote object is loaded
2. Your instance tries to read it and render it properly.
3. The activity is recognized as being unsupported.
4. Mastodon downgrades it to a Note with a URL pointing at where the object actually is on the Web.

The thing is, this generally looks pretty ugly. There are a few workarounds where the Note includes an embedded player for media, such as with PeerTube videos or Funkwhale tracks, but the experience overall is still kind of iffy.

An Alternative

Right now, the current model for content negotiation on the Fediverse looks like this: your platform makes the call about how to render fallbacks to unsupported Activity types.

This is…better than nothing, but it’s a far cry from the interoperability ideal we seem to want.

What if we had a way for Activities to define an alternative Activity type to fall back to, if the native type is unsupported? There are some benefits to this approach:

• Publishing platforms can define how their content looks across multiple post types.
• Content ends up looking more native on the respective platform that is viewing it.
• Friction is reduced for readers, so directly subscribing from Mastodon to say, WordPress ends up working in a way that feels native.

Representation

So, here’s an example of what Article looks like in ActivityPub. For reference, it’s this article that I published recently.

{
"@context":[
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
{
"Hashtag":"as:Hashtag"
}
],
"id":"https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/",
"type":"Article",
"attachment":[
{
"type":"Image",
"url":"https://i0.wp.com/wedistribute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/eu-dsa-fedi.png?fit=780%2C470&ssl=1",
"mediaType":"image/png"
}
],
"attributedTo":"https://wedistribute.org/@news",
"content":"<p><a href="https://about.iftas.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IFTAS</a>, the Trust & Safety organization dedicated to the Fediverse, <a href="https://about.iftas.org/2024/04/09/dsa-guide-for-the-fediverse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a guide</a> on the <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32022R2065" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EU’s Digital Services Act</a> earlier this week. The guidance is primarily geared towards instance admins and moderation teams in the Fediverse, and spells out policy obligations for compliance.</p><figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote class="quote-light"><p>If your server has member accounts in the EU, or is publicly viewable in the EU, your service is most likely impacted by this regulation, <a href="https://dsa-observatory.eu/2023/11/01/the-extraterritorial-implications-of-the-digital-services-act/">even if you are not based or hosted in the EU</a>.</p><p><cite>IFTAS BLOG</cite></p></blockquote></figure><p>Despite the fact that there are now new considerations in place for people who run Fediverse instances, there are a number of positive outcomes here:</p><ul><li>Most Fediverse servers are relatively small communities, and likely fall under the designation of “Small and Micro Enterprises” – if your server doesn’t employ 50 or more people, and doesn’t take an annual income of over 10 million Euros, you’re probably in this designation. Compared to Very Large Online Platforms, your obligations are fewer in comparison.</li><li>Services are not considered liable for content unless they have been notified of its presence. Failure to take said content down is where the liability starts</li><li>Platforms are not held liable for proactively searching for and removing illegal content.</li></ul><h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-takeaways">Big Takeaways</h2><p>Most of what’s listed in EU DSA requirements come across as simple, common sense, and already-adopted practices. The report published by IFTAS provides suggestions for best practices, and even includes templates for the bare minimum requirements for admins to use. </p><p>The biggest changes admins need to be aware of mostly relate to accountability: servers need to assign an EU representative for compliance, need to report on malicious content to local authorities, and needs to provide a notice mechanism (such as email) to inform suspended or banned users of a service of the action taken, as well as the reason.</p><p>On the matter of being required to assign an EU-based representative for compliance, IFTAS states the following:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote quote-light is-layout-flow wp-block-quote quote-light-is-layout-flow"><p>If your service is accessible to users in the EU but you don’t have an establishment there, you’re required to designate either a legal or natural person as your legal representative within one of the Member States where you offer services. </p><p>Your legal representative will act on your behalf for interactions with the EU’s Member States’ authorities, regarding compliance with and enforcement of the DSA. You must notify the Digital Services Coordinator in the Member State of your representative’s name, postal address, email address, and telephone number. Ensure this information is public, easily accessible, accurate, and regularly updated. Most legal representative services do not offer an affordable option for donation-driven services. </p><p><strong>IFTAS is researching ways to offer this service, but in the meantime, we strongly recommend you ensure you have added a designated contact for authorities to reach you</strong></p></blockquote><p>This will probably be the biggest hurdle for instance operators in the short term, as many instances are roughly the same size as a community group or forum, in terms of users. This is a new consideration for a lot of admins, and not necessarily one that anybody’s given thought to in the past fifteen years.</p><p>Regardless, IFTAS has produced a valuable service with lots of insight, advice, and examples for server admins. Hopefully, this will serve as a benefit to the Fediverse as many attempt to navigate compliance for the very first time.</p><div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-1 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"><div class="wp-block-button has-custom-width wp-block-button__width-75 has-custom-font-size is-style-outline has-medium-font-size"><a class="wp-block-button__link wp-element-button" href="https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DSA-Guide-Decentralised-Servers.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Download the Report</a></div></div><p><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/">https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/</a></p><p><a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/moderation/">#Moderation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/regulation/">#Regulation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/trust-safety/">#TrustSafety</a></p>",
"contentMap":{
"en":"<p><a href="https://about.iftas.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IFTAS</a>, the Trust & Safety organization dedicated to the Fediverse, <a href="https://about.iftas.org/2024/04/09/dsa-guide-for-the-fediverse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a guide</a> on the <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32022R2065" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EU’s Digital Services Act</a> earlier this week. The guidance is primarily geared towards instance admins and moderation teams in the Fediverse, and spells out policy obligations for compliance.</p><figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote class="quote-light"><p>If your server has member accounts in the EU, or is publicly viewable in the EU, your service is most likely impacted by this regulation, <a href="https://dsa-observatory.eu/2023/11/01/the-extraterritorial-implications-of-the-digital-services-act/">even if you are not based or hosted in the EU</a>.</p><p><cite>IFTAS BLOG</cite></p></blockquote></figure><p>Despite the fact that there are now new considerations in place for people who run Fediverse instances, there are a number of positive outcomes here:</p><ul><li>Most Fediverse servers are relatively small communities, and likely fall under the designation of “Small and Micro Enterprises” – if your server doesn’t employ 50 or more people, and doesn’t take an annual income of over 10 million Euros, you’re probably in this designation. Compared to Very Large Online Platforms, your obligations are fewer in comparison.</li><li>Services are not considered liable for content unless they have been notified of its presence. Failure to take said content down is where the liability starts</li><li>Platforms are not held liable for proactively searching for and removing illegal content.</li></ul><h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-takeaways">Big Takeaways</h2><p>Most of what’s listed in EU DSA requirements come across as simple, common sense, and already-adopted practices. The report published by IFTAS provides suggestions for best practices, and even includes templates for the bare minimum requirements for admins to use. </p><p>The biggest changes admins need to be aware of mostly relate to accountability: servers need to assign an EU representative for compliance, need to report on malicious content to local authorities, and needs to provide a notice mechanism (such as email) to inform suspended or banned users of a service of the action taken, as well as the reason.</p><p>On the matter of being required to assign an EU-based representative for compliance, IFTAS states the following:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote quote-light is-layout-flow wp-block-quote quote-light-is-layout-flow"><p>If your service is accessible to users in the EU but you don’t have an establishment there, you’re required to designate either a legal or natural person as your legal representative within one of the Member States where you offer services. </p><p>Your legal representative will act on your behalf for interactions with the EU’s Member States’ authorities, regarding compliance with and enforcement of the DSA. You must notify the Digital Services Coordinator in the Member State of your representative’s name, postal address, email address, and telephone number. Ensure this information is public, easily accessible, accurate, and regularly updated. Most legal representative services do not offer an affordable option for donation-driven services. </p><p><strong>IFTAS is researching ways to offer this service, but in the meantime, we strongly recommend you ensure you have added a designated contact for authorities to reach you</strong></p></blockquote><p>This will probably be the biggest hurdle for instance operators in the short term, as many instances are roughly the same size as a community group or forum, in terms of users. This is a new consideration for a lot of admins, and not necessarily one that anybody’s given thought to in the past fifteen years.</p><p>Regardless, IFTAS has produced a valuable service with lots of insight, advice, and examples for server admins. Hopefully, this will serve as a benefit to the Fediverse as many attempt to navigate compliance for the very first time.</p><div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-2 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"><div class="wp-block-button has-custom-width wp-block-button__width-75 has-custom-font-size is-style-outline has-medium-font-size"><a class="wp-block-button__link wp-element-button" href="https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DSA-Guide-Decentralised-Servers.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Download the Report</a></div></div><p><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/">https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/</a></p><p><a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/moderation/">#Moderation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/regulation/">#Regulation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/trust-safety/">#TrustSafety</a></p>"
},
"published":"2024-04-11T20:55:20Z",
"tag":[
{
"type":"Hashtag",
"href":"https://wedistribute.org/tag/moderation/",
"name":"#Moderation"
},
{
"type":"Hashtag",
"href":"https://wedistribute.org/tag/regulation/",
"name":"#Regulation"
},
{
"type":"Hashtag",
"href":"https://wedistribute.org/tag/trust-safety/",
"name":"#TrustSafety"
}
],
"updated":"2024-04-11T20:55:29Z",
"url":"https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/",
"to":[
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public",
"https://wedistribute.org/wp-json/activitypub/1.0/users/25798931/followers"
],
"cc":[
]
}

It does some weird things, such as adding the thumbnail as an attachment, but here’s what it ends up looking like on Mastodon, vs how it looks in Akkoma:

Mastodon grabs a thumbnail, wheras Akkoma will try to render the entire freaking post! And aside from a few quirks, it looks pretty good overall.

Here’s an idea, though: let’s do the same thing again, but this time, let’s attach a second rendition of what we would want users on Mastodon to see. For demonstration purposes, we’ll call this content-fallback.

{
"@context":[
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
{
"Hashtag":"as:Hashtag"
}
],
"id":"https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/",
"type":"Article",
"attachment":[
{
"type":"Image",
"url":"https://i0.wp.com/wedistribute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/eu-dsa-fedi.png?fit=780%2C470&ssl=1",
"mediaType":"image/png"
}
],
"attributedTo":"https://wedistribute.org/@news",
"content":"<p><a href="https://about.iftas.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IFTAS</a>, the Trust & Safety organization dedicated to the Fediverse, <a href="https://about.iftas.org/2024/04/09/dsa-guide-for-the-fediverse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a guide</a> on the <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32022R2065" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EU’s Digital Services Act</a> earlier this week. The guidance is primarily geared towards instance admins and moderation teams in the Fediverse, and spells out policy obligations for compliance.</p><figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote class="quote-light"><p>If your server has member accounts in the EU, or is publicly viewable in the EU, your service is most likely impacted by this regulation, <a href="https://dsa-observatory.eu/2023/11/01/the-extraterritorial-implications-of-the-digital-services-act/">even if you are not based or hosted in the EU</a>.</p><p><cite>IFTAS BLOG</cite></p></blockquote></figure><p>Despite the fact that there are now new considerations in place for people who run Fediverse instances, there are a number of positive outcomes here:</p><ul><li>Most Fediverse servers are relatively small communities, and likely fall under the designation of “Small and Micro Enterprises” – if your server doesn’t employ 50 or more people, and doesn’t take an annual income of over 10 million Euros, you’re probably in this designation. Compared to Very Large Online Platforms, your obligations are fewer in comparison.</li><li>Services are not considered liable for content unless they have been notified of its presence. Failure to take said content down is where the liability starts</li><li>Platforms are not held liable for proactively searching for and removing illegal content.</li></ul><h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-takeaways">Big Takeaways</h2><p>Most of what’s listed in EU DSA requirements come across as simple, common sense, and already-adopted practices. The report published by IFTAS provides suggestions for best practices, and even includes templates for the bare minimum requirements for admins to use. </p><p>The biggest changes admins need to be aware of mostly relate to accountability: servers need to assign an EU representative for compliance, need to report on malicious content to local authorities, and needs to provide a notice mechanism (such as email) to inform suspended or banned users of a service of the action taken, as well as the reason.</p><p>On the matter of being required to assign an EU-based representative for compliance, IFTAS states the following:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote quote-light is-layout-flow wp-block-quote quote-light-is-layout-flow"><p>If your service is accessible to users in the EU but you don’t have an establishment there, you’re required to designate either a legal or natural person as your legal representative within one of the Member States where you offer services. </p><p>Your legal representative will act on your behalf for interactions with the EU’s Member States’ authorities, regarding compliance with and enforcement of the DSA. You must notify the Digital Services Coordinator in the Member State of your representative’s name, postal address, email address, and telephone number. Ensure this information is public, easily accessible, accurate, and regularly updated. Most legal representative services do not offer an affordable option for donation-driven services. </p><p><strong>IFTAS is researching ways to offer this service, but in the meantime, we strongly recommend you ensure you have added a designated contact for authorities to reach you</strong></p></blockquote><p>This will probably be the biggest hurdle for instance operators in the short term, as many instances are roughly the same size as a community group or forum, in terms of users. This is a new consideration for a lot of admins, and not necessarily one that anybody’s given thought to in the past fifteen years.</p><p>Regardless, IFTAS has produced a valuable service with lots of insight, advice, and examples for server admins. Hopefully, this will serve as a benefit to the Fediverse as many attempt to navigate compliance for the very first time.</p><div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-1 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"><div class="wp-block-button has-custom-width wp-block-button__width-75 has-custom-font-size is-style-outline has-medium-font-size"><a class="wp-block-button__link wp-element-button" href="https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DSA-Guide-Decentralised-Servers.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Download the Report</a></div></div><p><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/">https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/</a></p><p><a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/moderation/">#Moderation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/regulation/">#Regulation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/trust-safety/">#TrustSafety</a></p>",
"contentMap":{
"en":"<p><a href="https://about.iftas.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IFTAS</a>, the Trust & Safety organization dedicated to the Fediverse, <a href="https://about.iftas.org/2024/04/09/dsa-guide-for-the-fediverse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a guide</a> on the <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32022R2065" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EU’s Digital Services Act</a> earlier this week. The guidance is primarily geared towards instance admins and moderation teams in the Fediverse, and spells out policy obligations for compliance.</p><figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote class="quote-light"><p>If your server has member accounts in the EU, or is publicly viewable in the EU, your service is most likely impacted by this regulation, <a href="https://dsa-observatory.eu/2023/11/01/the-extraterritorial-implications-of-the-digital-services-act/">even if you are not based or hosted in the EU</a>.</p><p><cite>IFTAS BLOG</cite></p></blockquote></figure><p>Despite the fact that there are now new considerations in place for people who run Fediverse instances, there are a number of positive outcomes here:</p><ul><li>Most Fediverse servers are relatively small communities, and likely fall under the designation of “Small and Micro Enterprises” – if your server doesn’t employ 50 or more people, and doesn’t take an annual income of over 10 million Euros, you’re probably in this designation. Compared to Very Large Online Platforms, your obligations are fewer in comparison.</li><li>Services are not considered liable for content unless they have been notified of its presence. Failure to take said content down is where the liability starts</li><li>Platforms are not held liable for proactively searching for and removing illegal content.</li></ul><h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-takeaways">Big Takeaways</h2><p>Most of what’s listed in EU DSA requirements come across as simple, common sense, and already-adopted practices. The report published by IFTAS provides suggestions for best practices, and even includes templates for the bare minimum requirements for admins to use. </p><p>The biggest changes admins need to be aware of mostly relate to accountability: servers need to assign an EU representative for compliance, need to report on malicious content to local authorities, and needs to provide a notice mechanism (such as email) to inform suspended or banned users of a service of the action taken, as well as the reason.</p><p>On the matter of being required to assign an EU-based representative for compliance, IFTAS states the following:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote quote-light is-layout-flow wp-block-quote quote-light-is-layout-flow"><p>If your service is accessible to users in the EU but you don’t have an establishment there, you’re required to designate either a legal or natural person as your legal representative within one of the Member States where you offer services. </p><p>Your legal representative will act on your behalf for interactions with the EU’s Member States’ authorities, regarding compliance with and enforcement of the DSA. You must notify the Digital Services Coordinator in the Member State of your representative’s name, postal address, email address, and telephone number. Ensure this information is public, easily accessible, accurate, and regularly updated. Most legal representative services do not offer an affordable option for donation-driven services. </p><p><strong>IFTAS is researching ways to offer this service, but in the meantime, we strongly recommend you ensure you have added a designated contact for authorities to reach you</strong></p></blockquote><p>This will probably be the biggest hurdle for instance operators in the short term, as many instances are roughly the same size as a community group or forum, in terms of users. This is a new consideration for a lot of admins, and not necessarily one that anybody’s given thought to in the past fifteen years.</p><p>Regardless, IFTAS has produced a valuable service with lots of insight, advice, and examples for server admins. Hopefully, this will serve as a benefit to the Fediverse as many attempt to navigate compliance for the very first time.</p><div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-2 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"><div class="wp-block-button has-custom-width wp-block-button__width-75 has-custom-font-size is-style-outline has-medium-font-size"><a class="wp-block-button__link wp-element-button" href="https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DSA-Guide-Decentralised-Servers.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Download the Report</a></div></div><p><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/">https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/</a></p><p><a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/moderation/">#Moderation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/regulation/">#Regulation</a> <a rel="tag" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://wedistribute.org/tag/trust-safety/">#TrustSafety</a></p>"
},
"published":"2024-04-11T20:55:20Z",
"tag":[
{
"type":"Hashtag",
"href":"https://wedistribute.org/tag/moderation/",
"name":"#Moderation"
},
{
"type":"Hashtag",
"href":"https://wedistribute.org/tag/regulation/",
"name":"#Regulation"
},
{
"type":"Hashtag",
"href":"https://wedistribute.org/tag/trust-safety/",
"name":"#TrustSafety"
}
],
"updated":"2024-04-11T20:55:29Z",
"url":"https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/",
"to":[
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public",
"https://wedistribute.org/wp-json/activitypub/1.0/users/25798931/followers"
],
"cc":[
],
"content-fallback": {
  "content":"IFTAS, the dedicated Trust & Safety organization for the #Fediverse, recently published a report on the EU's Digital Services Act, along with suggestions on what admins can do. https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/",
  "mediaType":"text/plain",
  "summary":"",
  "tag":[
  {
  "href":"https://wedistribute.org/tags/fediverse",
  "name":"#fediverse",
  "type":"Hashtag"
  }
  ],
  "type":"Note",
  "updated":"2024-04-11T20:55:29Z"
  }
}

Basically, the content-fallback section is just a basic representation of Note. The above example is a naive / simplistic representation; an actual microblogging post would probably have a lot more details fleshed out with ContentMap and things of that nature.

Still, if a platform like Mastodon respected content-fallback, it would see this, instead of the boring old link and attachment it saw before:

What’s cool about this idea is that implementers could fill in different fields for the JSON representation automatically: in WordPress, the Excerpt could optionally be provided as the text blurb in the Note, prior to the Link being displayed. Alternatively, this could be filled with another field, maybe what would normally be used in the Share to Mastodon dialog.

In Summary

For the longest time, it’s been up to the receiving platform to decide what content ought to look like for unsupported Activity types. When done with care, the experience can be pretty great. When disregarded completely, however, it ends up looking like crap.

Giving publishing platforms the ability to define sane fallbacks for their unique content types might be a way forward. Right now, we’re in a situation where our own publishing platform does not make content that looks great in a big chunk of the Fediverse, and a lot of this can be chalked up to Mastodon just shrugging and not really doing anything useful with the Activity type. Being able to offer good-looking alternatives as a fallback could help with interoperability, without forcing the receiving platform to do all the work for every new type of Activity.