Discussion
My position on ATProto, as a protocol, is that the Good Part is the PDS¹. Everything good about ATProto comes from the PDS. It's the "everything else" that is the source of the problems — centralization, high barriers to entry, tendency to monopoly, some of the censorship. Unfortunately, most of the system is "everything else".
¹ "Personal data server". The repo of posts that Bluesky scrapes to form feeds.
@mcc But really, is there anything that's "new" to PDS'es that isn't basically a blog + RSS/atom feed? Signed posts seems like the main one?
@cwebber the important thing is not that it's new it's that they built it
@cwebber also the thing I see the PDS as providing at root is "a standard API for requesting data objects by key". a blog isn't that, you can address it by key (URL) but it returns formatted HTML not a data representation. RSS isn't that either, RSS is a linear recency-biased stream, and anyway we don't want RSS we want ActivityPub. You could expose the PDS xrpcs from Wordpress with a plugin the same way you can add ActivityPub to WordPress with a plugin.
@cwebber But also, WordPress is a horrible, security-vulnerability-infested nightmare to maintain, and the BlueSky PDS is easy and resource-cheap to maintain, so I'd rather have (and eventually, will write) PDS with a wordpress-like frontend than WordPress with a PDS-like frontend
@mcc That's a reasonable one, to have a content-addressing retrieval endpoint!
@mcc Possibly that they're content-addressed too (though do most PDS'es use did:plc or did:web ?)
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