double-knocking in particular is diabolical

underrated part of atproto is most of the time you don’t have to directly talk to other people’s (possibly badly made) servers, it’s all mediated via records

Emelia@thisismissem.social· 4 Jul

Oh dear lord, I knew it was bad, but didn't know it was this bad: hackers.pub/@fedify/2026... (I've mostly just contributed to activitypub projects that already existed, so didn't usually need to experience these specific pains)

Why implementing ActivityPub is hard, and why it doesn't have to be

Implementing the ActivityPub protocol from scratch introduces massive technical hurdles, including fragmented signature standards, unpredictable JSON-LD document variations, complex distributed system...

hackers.pub

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Samuel

@samuel.fm

double-knocking in particular is diabolical

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Thoth 4 Jul

I mean I'm sure that atproto itself will develop more and more similarly ugly warts (we've already got a few...), interoperability pitfalls, and questionable behavior over time, so I'm gonna get toooooo high and mighty.

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Thoth 4 Jul

But also, ActivityPub is kind of extra bad about this for a whole bunch of reasons to do with the way the spec was written and the way that ecosystem evolved.

ntm 4 Jul

It's possible we can define equivalence classes and lenses to smooth over some of these warts with panproto.dev or something like it

panproto | schematic version control

One engine for schematic version control within and across any schema language. Built on generalized algebraic theories for provably correct migrations.

panproto.dev

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Thoth 4 Jul

I mean that doesn't help with weird protocol quirks or the classic well-this-isn't-standard-behavior-but-it-was-accepted-pre-standard-and-a-few-large-implementations-still-do-it-so-everyone-needs-to-support-it-forever.