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Probably a bit early to be discussing implementation, but a question I’ve been wondering about: Will alternative PDS implementations be able to support permissioned data? If so, what will that on-ramp look like? At what point will we have an opportunity to build and test that? Thanks. 😊

I’m working on a proposal for composable community infrastructure that maps very neatly into the “bucket” concept. I think this is exactly how we should be thinking about things!

One use case for realm style private data might be early-access content (i.e. add locked webcomics). Ideally posts would become public after a set amount of time. Probably out of scope for the initial implementation, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about.

This is soooo interesting 😍 thank you for taking the time explain all this, real masterclass in systems design

The bucket approach makes sense. Love the way you’ve laid this out. The questions at the end are super critical for how smoothly this works - looking forward to part 3. I’ve been involved in the AP version of figuring out how threads work in this context, and there’s plenty of trade offs as you say

Ok by coincidence I started on the Merkle tree root so I could have a known root to track on enrollment but had been trying to stay with mst so existing tools/apps could hook in easily and verify, going to look at those options a bit more

HMAC would require everyone in the bucket to agree to the same key, so you would likely need a GKA protocol like MLS, right?

isn't merkle tree root what we have right now?

Ohhh, I'm closely watching this one. The social network I'm working on (Hardcover.app) allows for readers to track various things in the system with permissions (public, people they follow, private to them). Still wrapping my head around ATProto, but permissions data will be a big part for us.

E.g. for gated content There is a blessed PDS that hosts the ACLs? Oh wait no, web of trust?

yeah. i think it would be pretty confusing to see, for example, my "bookmarks" bucket in a prompt for where to share my "story" to

If there's any common agreement around that, we still have to decide how we participate in those shared private areas, and I wouldn't want to do that from my public repo. But then, I'm assuming that repos are cheap and that I can easily have one that is dedicated to a shared space.

I like this quite a bit, the buckets idea maps somewhat cleanly to MLS groups, though there is of course still a lot of unanswered questions.

Is the end goal something like web access control? With small incremental steps? solidproject.org/TR/wac

if you mean if its gonna be backwards compatible to the current spec, yea its most likely just gonna be an extension so old apps will work the same but if they want to they can use the new stuff they talked about wanting to add separate apis for this only place that would need to update is the PDS

the final idea is directories with user groups and chgrp (not saying this sarcastically, it’s very practical)

all good questions! & very much on our mind as well unfortunately i think they'll have to wait til the next post 😅