Why one-to-one relation of Actor to Account is an edge case; from https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/260
Actor is actually User's virtual identity, their identifiable representative in a social network. Now please think about the Global Social Network ("federation of websites”), which is connected using #ActivityPub protocol.
How many different Actors would you use and how many Accounts?
I mostly use two different actors: "yvolk" as my personal Actor, and "#AndStatus” as my project's Actor. But I use (or used recently, so there is a history of my posts...) tens of Accounts to represent these two logical Actors at different Servers (websites). And I don't expect to switch to two Accounts for these two Actors any time soon. For many reasons... And as I see posts of other Users, they quite often use several Accounts e.g. for wider audience (different Servers have different audiences and different posts are visible from them...) and as a backup in a case of a server's outage or permanent shut down.
Due to limitation of most of existing Servers, each separate Account means a separate Actor (and ActivityPub copies this approach). But this is not what a User wants, when he or she creates the same ”MyCoolUserName" at different Servers. Ideally a User needs to decide if any new Account is for the same existing Actor or for a new one.
#ActivityPub currently not only doesn't give such an option. It confuses terminology and mixes User/Account/Actor notions so, that it's even impossible to express the need and clearly state current limitation of the protocol using terminology of this spec. But it will allow to clarify this using changes, resulted from this our discussion ;-)
And I see that a User who needs only one Account for his Actor, is usually a Newbie or someone, who doesn't use a Social Network actively. This is why I regard one-to-one Account to Actor relation as an edge case, not as a normal one.
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yvolk@loadaverage.org
URL: https://loadaverage.org/notice/10898565