>There's no guarantee that a collection would present items in chronological vs. reverse chronological order — are you checking the timestamps and reversing as needed?
The ordering can be specified by some property of Collection
>Wouldn't you need to paginage through the entire collection anyway?
The client will fetch pages until it finds an item that has already been processed.
> I think that informs why I set up topic synchronization in this manner, and why my idea of context collections contain only objects; to me, activities don't really mean much at all.
I'd prefer context to be a collection of objects too, as long as there's a way to retrieve activity history.
Activity-based sync seems more natural to me. I think ActivityPub can be better understood not as a protocol for social networking, but as a distributed database where nodes sync datasets by sending messages over the network. Messages are activities, datasets are collections. When I send a Follow activity and your server responds with an Accept, followers and following collections are updated on both sides (or their equivalents if you don't store activities and collections). More generally, any activity delivery can be viewed as a synchronization of outbox collection.
I think such change of perspective can greatly improve DX and provide a solid foundation for further protocol extensions