@ipv.sx had a chat with @dholms.xyz about permissioned data and has written up a full post with his thoughts.
My post with vague complaints about the proposal that daniel holmgren made for permissioned data got a bit of attention. Daniel was kind enough to take the time to chat with me, and I wanted to provide some more fulsome thoughts as a result of that conversation. (To be clear, these are my thoughts; I’m not claiming that Daniel agrees with them!)
tl;dr: If permissioned data is worth doing, it’s worth doing for everything. Public data like we have today should be a special case. We should design the system as if we’re headed in that direction. In particular, the deniable cryptography currently in the proposal should be dropped.
On the one hand, it’s generally not good form to both have an IETF working group and do new work elsewhere. On the other hand, it is good to keep the IETF group focused on its charter, and it’s fine to incubate stuff elsewhere until we have enough confidence to start nailing it down.
The community as a whole doesn’t have the resources to have standing at the IETF, so getting things worked out, adopted, and interoperably implemented outside is likely going to be the regular pattern.
When I say standing I mostly mean - time, money, resources to participate.
The pre-standards stuff has to happen somewhere.
Can you think of other examples or can you think about how things might be changing WRT to IETF patterns and timing of bringing things into the WG?
I’ll write a longer write up to this and Eli’s post soon!
I do want to push back on this a bit^^
Just a reminder:
IETF is open participation - both on the mailing list and in person
IETF meetings are intended to keep remote participants on equal footing to in-person participation (obviously impossible to do that 100%, but the remote participation really is very good)
IETF generally offers to comp a one-day remote-participation ticket
Do not be intimidated by the mailing list! You can jump in and start discussions on there with about the same amount of effort as a discussion on this forum
The IETF is excited to have a new ecosystem of developers participating in the IETF process. The IETF prioritizes “running code”, so if you’re an implementer, your voice is important and respected in the room!
All of that is just to say that the standardization process does not require any additional money or resources to participate in than participating in more informal ecosystem discussions. I want to make sure folks aren’t getting scared off from participating! A big part of the reason for getting this working group set up is so that the protocol could have a governance structure in which other implementers are on an equal footing to Bluesky.
In my view, the main reasons for not doing this in the IETF working group are:
It’s not in the charter. We intentionally kept a narrow initial charter for the working group. Rechartering is a possibility, but we should hit some of our existing milestones before doing so.
We want implementation & adoption of an initial design for permissioned data to happen more quickly than the IETF process generally allows for.
This is not to say that permissioned data can’t be discussed on the mailing list. For instance, it may affect things like the flexibility of the URI scheme, or the data model. Decisions in the atp working group may affect design decisions in the permissioned data protocol.