Key to trick was to have bucket named "xrpc" and store a file there: https://s3.amazonaws.com/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHa...
There is also another funny thing in the image, the user posting about is sending one from "retr0-id.translate.goog", which is odd. Somehow he has got https://retr0-id.translate.goog/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.re... to redirect to his page, and gotten that handle as well.
I myself have had an account for like a month now, but only started really using it a week ago, because that calculus changed for me, personally.
Like, it's not even possible to truly delete posts at the moment. This all needs to be treated as a playground until things mature.
This isn't even the first "scandal" related to this feature already!!!! There is another hole in what currently exists that allowed someone to temporarily impersonate a Japanese magazine a few weeks back.
The whole point was to start from scratch.
I'd be curious to learn about those.
From my own understanding, the biggest useful differences for me personally is: account portability, domains as usernames and content-addressable from the ground up.
- Account portability - Useful if/when you want to move between servers
- Domains as usernames - Ties into the same value as account portability. I've owned my own domain for decades, it never changes and probably won't, until years after I die
- Content-addressable - Caching and syncing becomes so much easier, which is a huge issue Mastodon currently suffers from.
ActivityPub can identify users based on their domain too. Probably better than BlueSky does, because it uses better standardized mechanisms - the URI needs to dereference to a valid ActivityPub actor and the community has converged to using webfinger for discovery. The fact that web-finger is generally used for user discovery makes it easier to use the identical mechanism that BlueSky uses - where the identity (which in ActivityPub is a URL) is not tied directly to a domain. (Eg, if you do a webfinger query for marius.federated.id you will get a response where it tells you that one of the URLs for the ActivityPub identity associated with that is https://metalhead.club/@mariusor, you can check it out right now with curl https://marius.federated.id/.well-known/webfinger?resource=h...).
Account portability can exist in ActivityPub because the verbs for signaling to the network that an object/actor has moved to a different URL are in the vanilla vocabulary. The fact that nobody has implemented this so far does not make it impossible. (It's not like anyone so far needed to move from BlueSky to ... I don't know... BlueSky. So it being capable of moving identities is still equally theoretical in my view).
Regarding your last point (or the one made about it in the twitter thread), I don't really understand about how identifying content by its cryptographic signature is conducive to better caching and "syncing" (how in the world a hash would make it easier to sync content than a URL I don't know). HTTP clients, servers and proxies have very good caching and syncing mechanisms for anything that uses URLs to identify resources. Whatever BlueSky wants to do, must invent their own intermediary layers before anyone will be able to say "it's easier" with any certainty.
In my opinion nothing you mentioned can be called a "doing things wrong from first principals(sic)" - and I'm still hoping that linuxdude314 can make a better argument.
ActivityPub is fine for what it was designed to be: an exchange mechanism for "low impact" social activity. It's not meant to interact with cryptocurrencies, it's not meant to shelter dissidents from corrupt governments, it's not meant to help you interact with your drug dealer, nor whistle-blow on your employer. There are already options for those things. It is meant to allow your grandma to like your cat pictures in a more distributed manner than facebook offers. The people that imagine BlueSky will be doing something more than that, are - in my opinion - vastly overevaluating it.
(PS. Apparently this was not "similarly short", apologies.)