Thank you thank you thank you.

Parsing dates with anything other than fromisoformat feels totally backwards in comparison. We were using ciso8601 until fromisoformat was in the standard library. And now things are incredibly simple and reliable.

What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.

I built https://dailyalbum.art/ to solve a part of the browsing problem you're talking about. Nothing physical I'm afraid, but I do really love this RFID tap to play idea!

I've curated a list of 500+ critically acclaimed albums, which I continue to add to as the Mercury Prize nominees are announced each year, Rough Trade releases its albums of the year, etc.

It picks 12 a day and that's that; it's the same 12 for everyone. If you see something familiar, you might want to go for that. Or if you're in the mood for something new & different, you can give something unknown a try.

Thanks for the info, that does help me understand what's going on in the protocol.

I suppose I was thinking about the app responsible for getting the data into, say, Leaflet's local database in the first place. For that app, the data structures you describe are the APIs that it consumes, for the sole purpose of populating its own database.

That gets my cogs whirring about how good a use-case this would be for SQLite. I suppose it would be somewhat appropriate for a small, private, PDS? Although, if I understand correctly, I wouldn't need to worry about that anyway if I'm using some off-the shelf PDS software, e.g. https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

I'm pretty new to the at:// protocol, and I like what I'm reading, thanks for the write-up.

To your "This is not done by hitting an API" point; if I understand correctly, I'd argue that the _endpoints_ that you detail in your post _are_ the API. The whole point is that there's no single _central_ API, but each server that wants to be part of the network participates by hosting an API that meets the standard outlined in the protocol.

In a way it's semantics, but I'd be interested in yours thoughts on that. To either correct or confirm my understanding.