What an incredible article. More than its impressive documented scope and detail, I love it foremost for conveying what the zeitgeist felt at each point in history. This human element is something usually only passed on by oral tradition and very difficult to capture in cold, academic settings.
It’s fashionable to dunk on “how did all this cloud cruft become the norm”, but seeing a continuous line in history of how circumstance developed upon one another, where each link is individually the most rational decision at their given context, makes them an understandable misfortune of human history.
I wonder if you can hack a LocalStorage sync feature via ATProto PDS, since you can put arbitrary JSON records via /xrpc/com.atproto.repo.putRecord and not just Bluesky posts.
The only drawback I can think of is that all of your commits are broadcast on a megaphone to the network firehose, but encryption can alleviate that somewhat.
I am not familiar with it, but I was thinking about making an open source version of this, but using webRTC, to just directly allow peer-to-peer synchronization without a centralized server.
In this type of scenario there are a lot considerations to be made though, specifically since you can't use CRDT's to handle concurrent updates on the data you have to either 1) not allow offline use of the apps, 2) create a merge conflict resolving interface or 3) just overwrite all changes with the latest one.
Idk if people would be interested in this and I haven't been using my HTML tools for a while now, so it's just an idea, maybe someone else wants to work on.
It’s fashionable to dunk on “how did all this cloud cruft become the norm”, but seeing a continuous line in history of how circumstance developed upon one another, where each link is individually the most rational decision at their given context, makes them an understandable misfortune of human history.