Emelia
What are your thoughts about storage local compute? I wrote about this in regards to Solid because we were seeing BFFs that just accumulated people's data because "talking to a pod is too hard"
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Samuel
atproto is heavily architected around a hard separation between data hosting and data aggregation/presentation. we want to keep hosting as cheap as possible - going viral shouldn’t cost you money! I suppose in atproto, the appview *is* a BFF, with the PDS network being the “real” backend
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Samuel
@samuel.fm
what I’m talking about is BFF in the context of atproto - thinner clients, thicker appviews
dan@danabra.mov· 29 Mar 2025
these generic APIs often have issues with underfetching (not enough data for a screen, need multiple requests or worse — multiple roundtrips) and overfetching (grabbing more stuff that this particular screen doesn’t actually need). the idea with BFF is to be more tailored “server part of the client”
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Emelia
yeah, for solid it was this notion that interacting with a pod and lots of small files was hard, where as "stick everything in a huge postgresql database" was easy, but Solid doesn't really have a way to do sync (there is Linked Data Notifications, but that's not really sync)
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Emelia
So you end up with a postgresql containing data that's incorrect or has been deleted, because it wasn't refetched again, and you have no clear policies on data segregation and use: once your pods' data is in someone's postgresql database, what they do with the data is anyone's guess.
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Emelia
That's probably less of a concern for AT Proto where all data is public and easily sync-able.
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