< The Spring of '83 is not over

~tatterdemalion

I think it's a neat idea. I have not read the specification yet, only its description, but I get the feeling it is (like most things in 2022) more complex than it needs to be. It boils down to "show only the most recent post from each of my RSS feeds, in a Pinterest-style layout". Or if you don't prefer RSS, there's an IndieWeb way of doing the same thing. This spec adds in some arbitrary limitations (including the maximum number of people on the network!), and adds a gossip protocol and maybe some other things I'm missing. What I'm missing for sure, though, is why you need a spec for this...

Write a reply

Replies

~tatterdemalion wrote (thread):

Okay, I have, now, actually read the spec. There is a very narrow core of it that I actually quite like (keypair identities making authentication of posters and validation of posts trivial), and I like the general user experience goal... But there's a whole lot of other stuff I don't like. I do not like any "boil the oceans to prevent spam" mechanism, and this protocol has two (related ones) of them: the need for publishers to search the keyspace for keypairs that meet the protocol's requirements, and the "difficulty factor" that servers must apply before deciding to accept posts. I don't know *exactly* how much compute it would take to generate a key that is both compliant and high-difficulty, but I do know it provides bad incentives: rather than disincentivising spam (by making it expensive), it makes *only* profitable material postable by making the protocol pay-to-play once it's widely used.

I also don't particularly care for the 'realm' system. It makes sense, once you've accepted some of the other design goals (particularly "store the whole universe"). But there's not a huge benefit to accepting those goals to begin with.