I’ve been working on a spec & standard. Actually, it is a lot of copying of existing ones. Specifically podcasting2 from Podcast Index, and Apple’s iTunes, ported to the atmosphere.

Although I first started working on maincasts as a fun little side project after my wife had issues with her current podcast provider, and I wanted to build a service for her. The more I delved into the world of podcast, the more I realised how fragmented it was, despite the usage of an open standard like RSS being the backbone.

The story of RSS is all too familiar to anyone aware of the fragmentation of APIs/features across browsers, “proliferation” of javascript library/framework ecosystem etc. Likewise, analytics and counting correct listens is also filled with proprietary formats, archaic certifications which count downloads instead of listens and many different siloed attempts to solve all these problems. Specially for someone moving across hosting providers.

When I decided to pivot from a normal storage/communication based app to an AT-proto one, I realised that this could very well happen in the atmosphere as well. Lexicons can become duplicated as the user switches providers and pollute their pds. Moreover, many of the benefits of atmosphere, like interoperability across services, schema consistencies, and shared social graph would be lost in a disjointed standard.

So I’ve started work on a standard, to soon share with others who may be building/planning on building similar solutions. I am close to releasing the first draft. So I might already have a link next week.

Interesting reads

1. Gaussian splatting
   I found out about how google earth like maps may be remapped in the future for details on the highest zoom levels, where standard pictures taken from a normal or 360 camera can then be converted to glTF compatible 3D rasters

2. Kurzgesagt is wrong about Germany
   Political, but Kurzgesagt’s video was also political, so…

3. New method to turn ocean water into drinkable water, without waste
   Some good news
   

A project I discovered

A serverless datastore for real-time, streaming datar

GitHub - s2-streamstore/s2: Durable Streams API · GitHub

Durable Streams API. Contribute to s2-streamstore/s2 development by creating an account on GitHub.

I stumbled upon this package through some rabbit-holes. It isn’t useful for everyone of course, but interesting still. Here is a write-up from the founder back in Feb 2024

A photo I took

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a good week ahead! ✌🏽