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My first ActivityPub project was very literally just wasting my time solely on trying to make a JSON-LD-first ActivityPub library to try to abstract away it from the library consumer (within reason), back around the time before ActivityPub had reached W3C Recommedation status.

I would have saved myself some amount of months by just having not get snagged into that trap, and could have instead actually shipped a usable implementation back then.

Everyone else that actually shipped an ActivityPub implementation in the beginning were the ones that treated it solely as static JSON.

I'm not saying JSON-LD is hard, nor difficult to understand (and there are some niche projects where I do want to use it)---some of it's probably even an upgrade from similar things in the XML world, but it piles on more overhead that everything has to be expanded, checked against context, just to handle different representations, all while you'll still invariably have to interop with implementations that treat it as static JSON anyway.