Oddbean

For now, we do what the web does, we have "Indexers" that crawls homeservers and serve trusting clients. I think that is a good pragmatic first step. On one hand it is cheap and simple, on the other hand there is no gatekeeping or walled garden, anyone can spin a crawler/indexer. All what signed data ever does, is enable altruistic sharing of the burden of crawling... but that assumes there will be that altruistic sharing in the first place... if it ever happened, fine we will help it.

I think you're under-estimating what a game changer signed messages actually is. But I appreciate the back and forth, it's forced me to do some more research. pkarr seems great, and I do wish you guys the best, we're all on the same team. I just wish there could be more collaboration when we're all so aligned, it's the same problem you get on nostr — all the devs just go and do their own thing rather than working through differences. NIH is real.

If we talked you would hopefully realise I have a good grasp on what self authenticated data is good for. But I also know when it is not serving any real purpose, what I am saying is I have an intuition to the space where they fit. Consider that we may have started from the njump end of the spectrum; serving resources over HTTP. we can and should still fill the underlying space with Git like system. But hopefully you could appreciate that; 1. we are not shocking developers either tons of complexity that they don't need to build apps but also don't know they don't need, so just overwhelmed. 2. we don't commit to things we are not sure how it will work yet. 3. this is the time to get involved with us, discuss our plans for the data model that will be used for trustless data propagation, understand our motivation of that design and share your experience as a client dev or as relay operator. I would love to discuss these plans with anyone who listens, to get insights back.

I do appreciate all of that. And I'd like to see cross-pollination between the two projects. I'll be sure to read the docs when I have a chance. On the topic of digital signatures, you may be right that they aren't strictly needed, but I like them because they're so simple and give you so many guarantees that they really open up the design space and protect you from your own mistakes. Having them is a left side of the bell curve approach which makes the rest so much easier. They're a bit expensive in terms of computation, but I don't think they add very much complexity if you can just import a library and call a function. > I would love to discuss these plans with anyone who listens, to get insights back. Would you or John like to come on the nostr:nprofile1qyw8wumn8ghj76r0v3kxymmy9e3k7unpvdkx2tn5dahkcue0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgmwaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8wetnw3jhymnzw33jucm0d5hszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qgswaehxw309ahzummtxqhx7un89uqzphl3mpurnffw88l6vmukxylervy8xn22envuanr3678u9648r9363yvpq7 ? I've been trying to get other protocol devs on, but they all want to build in private and the timing is never right. I'm always interested in comparing notes.