Item — HN Reader

What questions do you have about AT? I agree its docs are mostly “bad” and hard to understand. I find the actual tech approachable so happy to answer more concrete questions.

Tools like http://pdsls.dev in particular can be helpful to see how things fit together.

2 comments

i think it really is as simple as boiling it down into a doc that looks like nip-1 and saying, "this is the absolute minimum amount you need to understand and implement to start sending messages on an AT-based network." -- not from a user perspective, but from an average developer perspective.

i know eventually i'd need to implement a ton more than the absolute bare minimum, but my gut-feeling "average developer brain" says nostr's absolute minimum feels smaller that AT's absolute minimum. i guess i'm looking for an AT doc for devs that shows the absolute minimum for creating a client that is equally approachable as NIP-1.

Thanks, that’s helpful. I’ll see if I can write something in that spirit later.

thanks. also, fwiw, i'm also a very a happy AT user (@hugs.bsky.social) besides also being a happy nostr user.

i appreciate bsky's focus on user ux and community building and look forward to seeing more sharing of ideas between nostr and AT.

edit to add: to nerd-snipe my brain into wanting to make stuff with AT (or any future protocol) is to focus on a quick-start or tutorial showing the absolute minimal client to send one message.

once i can do that... i'm ready to learn all the rest of the vocabulary and server-side stuff, but not until i can send one simple message from a barely functional minimal client.

Would it be ok to use a library or is the requirement to keep it to raw primitives like curl?

i like seeing a bit of the raw, low-level protocol first. a few curl examples are perfect for understanding what’s really happening under the hood. once i get that, i'm happy to use a library to handle all the edge cases.

but starting with a library tutorial makes me wonder how many stacks of turtles are being hidden. if i can see the turtles upfront, i'll appreciate what the library does for me -- and i'll have a better sense of how to debug when things break.

Absolutely. I think it’s a great constraint actually. I have a few other pieces in the backlog but I’ll keep this one in mind.

This isn’t quite what you want but should illuminate at least the “fetch on demand” part in detail: https://overreacted.io/where-its-at/

yeah, that looks like a good base for a simplified remix. thanks!

everything we need to authenticate the msg should exist in the msg. sig => timestamp, hash

The docs are bad, sadly that’s true.