BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

Folks, what's your take on Dorsey's AT Protocol?

@dwr.eth @cassie 

https://blueskyweb.xyz/

I help shape corporate narrative. Bird app: https://twitter.com/sumilvs

Extremely limited documentation, not nearly enough to formulate a concrete opinion. All I can really say is from the perspective of what I see now, and having to make conjectures. Here's the high level:

- DID (in terms of the bloated but also unclear standard) is a headache, and even they know it, so they have a placeholder definition.
- They already outline a call for media embeds, which is incredibly naive for a federated protocol without a solid p2p (at scale) video streaming protocol in existence yet.

- Why didn't they just incorporate distributed search and forego indexers? Given they don't have E2EE baked into their design it's certainly feasible. Again, they've been at this for three years? 
- Zero incentivization model. Not even a consideration.

- XRPC leaves more questions than it answers. Users are _not_ going to want to all run nodes, especially if they aren't solving larger scale problems around state synchronization between nodes w/r/t privacy and censorship

In short, this is a massive hat-tip to the capability and pragmatism of the Farcaster team, who has already launched, already taken advantage of native crypto features, and already outclassed Twitter.

- This took three years? How many people were working on this?
- The spec offers no opinion on how indexers _should_ or even _can_ work. While it's understandable to not decide the best approach, there is no guidance at all, which suggests in part they may not have even tried to build one outside of a naive one.