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alright here it is, my hit-piece on CARs in atproto, with a big ecosystem survey

I think this is legit to call out! STAR-lite is cool and solves a couple other paper cuts. but I think churning on low-level formats in the protocol spec itself probably isn't worth it? I do think the ecosystem can+should migrate away from older flexible IPLD libs to stricter DASL/atproto libs

pretty similar to the relay comparison that @iame.li did a couple months ago. with a bit of attention/coordination I don't think it will be that big of a lift to nail these down. getting the details nailed down in the IETF text first feels like the right sequencing.

yeah, if the reached-for libraries trend toward DASL (with actually-checked CID behaviour, which isn't technically required from the library itself in DASL) then hopefully the safety story gets better. i don't think the footgun will ever go away but maybe a kind of herd immunity works out

for public atproto this was really part 1 -- i think the streaming story is still bad, and that we need changes to DASL. (it doesn't actually say you're allowed to require a specific block order! it also vaguely hints that duplicate blocks could become disallowed! i worry about "happens to work")

(plus we still need to figure out how stream-ordered cars are even signalled, they still don't work by current draft. (i'm overdue for making the wg mailing list follow-up!)) for both spaces and public atproto it's a little disappointing to land at ~2x size/bandwidth overhead. but,

so is this also how you export and import spaces? because that circles back around to "are permissioned repos nominally stored as a merkle tree or nah" question

export for sync ya and no, afaik just a set of key/values and a 2kb lthash digest over it. you could keep it as an mst for key-value representation if convenient (but i’d argue that for public repos, storing the mst at all is just a convenience too hehe)

maybe I missed a beat, but I assume nobody is using MST for space data in any form? I have an iteration of the space CAR layout I need to publish...