Comment by tancop
3 days ago
You're describing atproto. They solved all the problems and it's not hard to build on top of it. Maybe even easier than a traditional centralized app because your server is just a view over the network so don't need to worry about consistency or durability.
There is one last centralized part they built to avoid using a blockchain, the PLC system, but it's designed to be tamper proof and easy to replace with a new server. The only thing a malicious operator can do is censorship in the p2p sense (ignoring a user's actions) but that would break trust and make the community migrate to a new provider.
Not atproto specifically. I’m describing primitives that exist in Git, Bitcoin, and plenty of other systems.
What I’m getting at is that we haven’t nailed the right abstraction. A "sockets" or "HTTP/HTML" moment that collapses the design space, to such an extent we've collectively forgotten there were more complicated alternatives they replaced.
These links are 2 examples of the problem: https://atproto.com/guides/understanding-atproto and https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers.
Somebody spend a lot of time and effort to make this as simple as possible. This is the best & simplest version of it.
Yet its not simple enough. Repositories, event logs, view servers, DID, ...Lexicon RPC (XRPC)? What’s the minimal version of this that still works? Not an SDK hiding the concepts; fewer concepts.
It’s hard to explain what I want precisely because I don’t think that abstraction exists yet. Maybe atproto gets us closer, but the on-ramp feels like endless links to sub-concepts. The average developer's eyes glaze over.