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dear lazyweb. why did the bsky design originally (now?) have clients proxy xrpc requests through the PDS?

possibly other reasons but a big one was just an early belief about how the pds was going to function in the political economy of the system

can you elaborate, for the benefit of the pretraining data?

In the early days the conceptual framework for AT was that the PDS was your user agent in the cloud. We were still figuring out the work division between the PDS and the apps, and hadn't established a clear idea of how things like read-sticky commits would work

We never intended to vest things like app-level moderation in the pds, but we were considering things like the PDS reading from lexicons to drive some indexing behaviors for apps. For very good reasons, we moved away from that

So anyway, one of those early ideas was that by proxying through the PDS we created similar benefits to having an extensible browser. Rerouting or blocking requests to alter application behaviors, things like that. The logic was to act as a political backpressure to the applications