Post

thread of some protocol hot takes from my time off that I hope to expand on...

mirroring existing catalog records (books, films, venues, etc) in to atproto records is tempting, but (IMHO) an anti-pattern. instead of copying that data in and referencing with an AT-URI, you should reference them by existing identifiers (ISBN, OSM identifier, etc). appviews sync the catalog.

public broadcast and permission spaces deserve different sync mechanisms (and probably URI schemes). public into a global shared heap is sort of a special-case audience/scope. but it is important and different enough that the MST+firehose are worth it. all the other affordances+tooling is reused!

I've changed my mind and there probably should be a generic/fallback profile record type for atmosphere accounts. something like gravatar.

OTOH, in most cases I think we (as an ecosystem) should balance the benefits of common/popular lexicons against diversity and heterogeneity. having multiple opinionated+idiosyncratic record schemas for the same use-case is often good, and appviews can+should support them. (with some exceptions)

hack for bulk importing records (eg, "migrate your posts from old system"): write all the original data as a blob (eg, zip/tar), and point to it from an import status record. periodically (daily?) poll status, write next (small) batch of records, and update the status record.

hosted atproto handles should work as a customizable personal homepage by default (eg, PDS acts like blento). huge "show don't tell" for atmosphere/web integration. (I think folks are aware of the juice and working towards this, but I wish it had shipped ages ago)