@silverpill @phnt do you mean "you" as in me personally or "you" as in some generalized sense? would me personally dropping swicg help anything, now or in 2023? because i'd probably do it if i didn't see a point to it, which is mainly "get the w3c specs into an actually usable state" (if at all possible).

i guess it seems like a problem if you see w3c involvement as a problem, but then i would ask who the constituents are. certainly there was a crowd in ~2017 onward who *really* wanted everyone to know activitypub was a w3c spec and won't stop talking about it to this day. i'm guessing you are okay with excluding those people, but then i wonder how to get anyone else actually on board with whatever it is the goal actually is.

having clear goals and a clear constituency is a prerequisite imo for any attempt to replace activitypub. for example, the spritely institute is doing a lot of work on ocapn in the face of legal threats. off the top of my head i can think of maybe a handful of people who would be interested in doing something outside of activitypub (and i'm in contact with a lot of them lmao)

i don't want to say activitypub is fully sucking the air out of the room but as someone who would rather work toward personal websites and local-first representations, it's frustrating that the idea of an activity is ostensibly described by activitystreams while not being fully usable for describing activity streams. it's frustrating that activitypub is not fully usable for publishing activities. i am not entirely sure of the value of making my own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary if it's going to end up 80% similar to activitystreams. the as2 documents i publish on my website are not readable by any fediverse software anyway, and i'm not sure i would want them to be, if it leads to being misunderstood and mangled that badly.