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.

Why it's almost as if the SILC protocol thought of that and supported MIME types for offloading other things (though I never saw much in the way of more than a proof of concept client that did much with the MIME support). @djsundog