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Paul Frazee
Personal blog · pfrazee.comprogrammingweb
Paul Frazee writes Paul's Dev Notes, a personal blog at pfrazee.com about programming and web. Since 2024, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Why Not RDF in the at Protocol?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Random dev notes about work at Bluesky by Paul Frazee
Most-linked posts?
- Why Not RDF in the at Protocol?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-19
- Practical Decentralization3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-02-25
- Atmospheric Computing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-12-31
- Guidance on Authoring Lexicons in ATProto2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-03-27
- Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-22
What Hacker News says?
See here for how schemas are defined: https://atproto.com/specs/lexicon I meant specifically that “unions” default to open. Let me give you an example. A Bluesky post may contain different types of attachments. Image, gallery, video, etc. That’s a union of known schemas. However, that union is open. That means that generated type will include “or unknown” as the last possible value. Apps are expected to ignore that…
Comment linking /blog/lexicon-guidance
on “Open Social”Submitted Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network? as a story · 204 points
HN discussionFor anyone who wants to read up more on this, another of Paul's (non-math) Notes (also, not the same Paul :) https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance
Comment linking /blog/lexicon-guidance
on “Open Social”Submitted Practical Decentralization as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThat's an incorrect assessment Lexicon schema are not enforced, they are a tool for social coordination, and most implementations are very liberal in what they accept https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance > isTool: true; isRule: false; meaning: undefined ActivityPub by contrast lacks such social coordination and many apps are reusing the same schema for very different concepts, leading to its own form of ove…
Comment linking /blog/lexicon-guidance
on “I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon”Submitted Why Not RDF in the at Protocol? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYes. Think of these as names of tables (or collections) in a distributed database. Or as type definitions. Or as app-defined data formats. Each lexicon is a schema for a model. So you’re looking at a list of such “types” — a “repo”, a “follow”, a “star” etc. There’s a “Tangled repo” lexicon, a “Bluesky post” lexicon, a “Leaflet publication” lexicon, and so on. Lexicons are specified and evolved by developers of each…
Comment linking /blog/why-not-rdf
on “Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto”Submitted Guidance on Authoring Lexicons in ATProto as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are a few more details about the reason they didn't use JSON-LD in Paul's blog post [0]. [0]: https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-rdf
Comment linking /blog/why-not-rdf
on “ATProto for distributed system engineers”Submitted Practical Decentralization as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor context, one of the core Bluesky developers was very involved in Scuttlebutt. It was a deliberate decision to not make AT more similar to SSB. https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-p2p
Comment linking /blog/why-not-p2p
on “We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour”Submitted Atmospheric Computing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe CTO @pfrazee had a lovely New Year's Eve post that talks about Atmospheric Computing and specifically raising the cold start problem and addressing how atproto tackles it. https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing Tangled here is a great example. An existing user base of a social network was able to rapidly join and start using a new app, a git forge, to share repos and collaborate. PRs and comments sho…
Comment linking /blog/atmospheric-computing
on “Tangled – We need a federation of forges”Submitted Why Not RDF in the at Protocol? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI actually wrote a blogpost explaining that: https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-rdf The TLDR is that we started with JSONSchema and then evolved it. OpenAPI didn't quite fit our needs either. Lexicon doesn't just describe APIs; it also describes records stored in user's data repositories.
Comment linking /blog/why-not-rdf
on “Lexicon Schema Definition Language”Submitted Practical Decentralization as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMaybe, coordination is the problem. What does that data look like, what does the target look like, can they be transformed? ATProto has lexicon, which are more about social coordination than schemas for data correctness https://pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance The protocol is much more than data portability, it essentially turns the global social media system into a giant distributed system anyone can participate i…
Comment linking /blog/lexicon-guidance
on “Publishing on the ATmosphere”Submitted Atmospheric Computing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSee https://www.pfrazee.com/leaflets/3lzhui2zbxk2b for some recent thoughts from a team member.
Comment linking /leaflets/3lzhui2zbxk2b
on “A Social Filesystem”
