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Genuinely curious, how would you build it differently? Would you stick with atproto's indexing model and try to simplify it, or would you use another approach?

by James_K3 hours ago|

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You send a request to a web indexer with a page you want added to the network, it scans your page for outgoing links and sends an email to the owners of any domains who are also on the service.

One can imagine making it a little more featureful, for instance indexing OPML blogrolls which would allow you to see whom a person follows and https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry which would allow outgoing links to be categorised (like, reply, etc) so notifications filtered. With that, it would be possible to add a front-end site imitating one of the popular social media paradigms (Reddit-style or Twitter-style being the most obvious).

If there's one genuine design decision I would give for it beyond what is basically a cobbling together of existing interfaces, it would be to charge users per page uploaded. Likely very detrimental to growing the service, but I think one of the simplest ways to weed out spam and junk. A real problem with many web services is that the receiver of the message pays for it in terms of attention, where in other mediums the sender has to pay. Given that uploading crap is basically free, that's all you get. Increasing the cost of upload would weed out those endless AI summaries and lists of affiliate links.

The issue with ATProto is that it operates on too many layers. You can see lacking in what I have described here the concept of durable authorship, but this is a property of content not how the content is distributed. Perhaps someone will invent a standard way to sign HTML documents, in which case you could base user accounts on that instead of DNS. AT enforces this centrally but it does not need to. It is walling itself off from the common and decentralised software ecosystem of the web for no good reason.

by inigyou1 hours ago|

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Isn't that how it already works but with different protocols that you don't like? You (a PDS) send a request to an indexer (relay) with a page (activity) you want added to the network.

by pfraze3 hours ago|

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Yeah that'd be interesting to try. If you extend the endpoints and the vocabularies around RSS/OPML enough, you could likely create a fairly robust dataset replication protocol. Microformats are a decent schema basis, but you might want to build upon them as well. If you want to make the users' sites reusable as a datastore across applications, you could introduce an oauth flow to enable 3rd party writes. You might also want to add content signatures so you can verify the data authenticity from third parties (e.g. to support the equivalent of reposts).

by James_K2 hours ago|

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You would repost a page by linking to it from your own. As for uploading content, that is outside of the scope of an indexer. The user hosts their data with some hosting service, or independently. I believe signatures are already handled by XHTML which allows you to add XML signatures to documents, but regular HTML is sadly lacking here thought it would not be too hard to extend (or to just use the XML serialisation of HTML5).

I think it is generally bad to implement new features like this on the part of the indexer. It should just keep track of an existing web of documents rather than creating it's own format and walled garden.

by pfraze2 hours ago|

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> You would repost a page by linking to it from your own.

Ah right, of course. Fair enough. I think Dave Winer is trying some similar ideas, though I haven't looked at it beyond knowing he's trying to extend RSS to support these capabilities.