the "object being forwarded" in this case is the activity. the language is indeed ambiguous. it should say "the original activity being forwarded". the goal of the language there is to prevent new recipients from being picked up during the recursive processing of other metadata fields -- for example, you may institute a policy that incoming activities to be forwarded must be relevant to some local object, and so you check inReplyTo, etc. but you MUST NOT add inReplyTo.attributedTo if they were initially omitted from delivery addressing. you must only check that they are a local user (or whatever your check is). EDIT: https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/441