AT Protocol
This week I've been diving into the AT Protocol.
The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a decentralized protocol for large-scale social web applications.
The protocol could be a candidate for the glue that holds together a distributed, computational wiki network. The protocol, it seems, is very similar to IPFS. Thankfully, a few years ago, I was working on building out a suite of OCaml libraries for working with IPFS. For example, ocaml-cid, self-describing content-addressed identifiers.
# let s = "zb2rhe5P4gXftAwvA4eXQ5HJwsER2owDyS9sKaQRRVQPn93bA";;
val s : string = "zb2rhe5P4gXftAwvA4eXQ5HJwsER2owDyS9sKaQRRVQPn93bA"
# let cid = Cid.of_string s |> Result.get_ok;;
val cid : Cid.t = <abstr>
# Cid.pp_human Format.std_formatter cid;;
cidv1 - base58btc - raw - ident(sha2-256) length(32) digest(6e 6f f7 95 0a 36 18 7a 80 16 13 42 6e 85 8d ce
68 6c d7 d7 e3 c0 fc 42 ee 03 30 07 2d 24 5c 95
To this end I have built out some more OCaml libraries for working with atproto, including:
atproto-data: the atproto data model, similar to JSON-LD.
ocaml-did: an OCaml library for working with decentralized identifiers.
atproto-lexicon: atproto's schema format, I've been building a quick tool for doing an OCaml translation from these schemas.
I managed to get a post published from the OCaml library after fixing it up and porting it to Eio.
An IR for Wikis
I started working on a proof-of-concept intermediate representation for Wikis -- I imagine it a bit like malfunction but for computational wikis i.e. a target for Wiki building tools that allows different front-ends and servers to communicate in a common IR for exposing key functionalities of a wiki:
Links: External links, cross-wiki backlinks
Versioned, temporal feeds
Etc.
Other PhD Work
I met with most of my Part II students this week, and I'm excited about their work. Progress reports are due this week and next they have a presentation to give.
In discrete maths this week we did induction. Next up is a big section on sets, functions, bijections etc.
Misc.
I was happy to find the Information Controls Fellowship Program.
The Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) cultivates research, outputs, and creative collaboration on topics related to repressive internet censorship and surveillance.