Okay, off the cuff and possibly wrongheaded in places depending on how it comes out:

A federated network of real-ish-time streaming data servers should have very minimal data payloads at their most basic level. The barest minimum of object properties for any object in a stream.

Implementations should add additional object properties to support their needs. There should be a well-defined format for sharing these additional properties and implementing elsewhere.

@djsundog it's easy to to way better than ostatus, but unfortunately ostatus is the only thing that people are using