Stephen Downes

This is an interesting article based on comparing podcasts (and by extension, RSS) and the ATmosphere protocol used by Bluesky. "'Wherever you get your podcasts' represents the interoperable utopia of the podcast world," writes Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg. "How do we bring that magic to the atmosphere?" In short: you can't. A podcast shares one simple thing, a podcast feed. But "on atproto, everything is a record, and each record has its own type. Posts, likes, follows, blocks, lists, profiles, comments, videos, and anything you can think of has its own defined schema, denoted by a $type." This gets even more complex when we start reasoning about things like follows and blocks. I find this article to be a good foil to contrast with my own approach in CList, which is a lot simpler.