The reading this week was less structured than usual, if only by virtue of the fact that there are many possible protocols to read up on, and not all of the documentation for them is… especially readable, let’s say.
Still, it was good. It was good to refresh myself on OpenID and Signal. ActivityPub and AT Protocol are newer, and I hadn’t read up on them at all. I was slightly familiar with Mastodon and Bluesky, but I honestly had a lot of misconceptions about the limitations of Bluesky–AT Protocol is much, much my decentralized and flexible than I had understood it to be. I actually have a lot more respect for AT now. (And somewhat less for ActivityPub, if I’m honest? Why do all actors have to have a record of what they’ve liked? It’s a design choice, I grant you, and clearly the protocol is working, but… well, I guess I just disagree with the wisdom of that design decision.)
Designing my own protocol, on the other hand, was a lot of fun! I feel like I got too deep into the weeds, working out lots of little details and losing sight of some of the big-picture stuff… I tried to avoid that by writing out the top-level goals first, but I still feel like my mind wandered. It’s very much a first draft, not a finished product–there would be a lot of refinement needed, complete with streamlining and reorganizing the “document” (such as it is) to make sure everything was logically structured. Still fun, though. It was an opportunity to let the geek out a bit.
I do feel like the protocol I came up with is very strongly based on AT Protocol. That’s a sign of how impressed I was with it, I suppose. But I also wanted to get a little bit of the flavor of the old LiveJournal access controls in there, and Signal’s use of multicast encryption for group chats was also a solid idea. I’m not as strongly versed in the details of multicast encryption as I am normal public/private key encryption, but if it’s in Signal, it’s been vetted and is cryptographically sound. May as well use it where it will be of benefit! (I’m not entirely convinced I’m using it correctly in my spec, but that would be something to be re-addressed in later revisions.)
I might actually dig more into AT Protocol and join that network. The fact that I can use my own domain and my own PDS is a strong plus. Even without access controls, there’s some limited utility in having a short-form broadcast point available that isn’t ExTwitter. (Which I was never happy with and only signed up on because, if I didn’t, somebody else was going to create the account for me.) Mastodon was interesting to research, but I don’t think it’s the right network for me.
Never thought I’d come out of this course all fired up on the technical details underpinning Bluesky, but there you go: we never know where the learning journey will take us. That’s why we have to keep an open mind along the way!
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