Comment by danabramov
20 days ago
Why so much cynicism? The people working there genuinely care about this stuff. Maybe you disagree with technical decisions but why start by projecting your fantasies about their motivations?
RSS is OK for what it does, but it isn't realtime, isn't signed, and doesn't support arbitrary structured data. Whereas AT is signed, works with any application-defined data structures, and lets you aggregate over millions of users in real time with subsecond end-to-end latency.
RSS is signed because it's served over HTTPS which involves an SSL certificate exchange. It is also real time. You fetch the feed and get the most up to date content on it. You can host any XML document you want on your website and there are W3C recommended standards that allow the integration of rich data structures within web pages.
The sole interesting part of ATProto is the aggregation part, which can also be solved in the same way with existing web technologies, that is a web indexer. Google allows you to set up notifications whenever a link is created to your website, which is essentially the unique offering of AT. None of the ideas it presents are new, but they are all incompatible with existing Web technologies. That is why I dislike it. I already have a website. I already have a set of RSS feeds that I follow. I do not want another website hosted on a strange and convoluted service in a bajillion different JSON records when there is a folder of XML on my computer called “my-website” which I can copy to any server and have all I need. Yet, in the name of a federated internet, the BSky folks have herded people away from the real distributed internet and into a crappy Twitter knockoff. Perhaps there are some business-unaware programmers very passionate about the idea of a distributed web and I commend them for that but it already exists and, in every real aspect, they are harming it. If this ATProto thing is successful in its goals, it will cause much inconvenience to me and greatly diminish my ability to publish my works on the internet.