Oh, there's also ~~Linked Data Signatures~~ Verifiable Credential Data Integrity that puts signatures right in the JSON itself. This is a real neat option that would allow for all sorts of great things like super easy and forwarding of messages with verifiable integrity, and the ability to store things in a verifiable/trusted way forever. Nobody really implemented it because:
- It was pretty under-baked and not standardized at all when AP started getting implemented (as evidenced by it changing names and basically being entirely rewritten). Mastodon, for example, is still on the old LD spec and would not be able to interop if your AP server did not also send the HTTP header signatures.
- IIRC there were some privacy concerns about always signing every action, thus not being able to deny that you did the thing you did. Not sure how real these concerns were, but I remember seeing this argument in the past and thinking it was unconvincing