Martin Kleppman is a technical advisor to Bluesky but his real job is as a researcher in distributed systems and security at the University of Cambridge. He also wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications, which many of us on the team have been fans of for years.
RFCs are used by IETF. I don’t think the Bluesky team is proposing an internet standard just yet. Nor should they - that’s not quite what the IETF is for.
Why not? The IETF defines many internet standards on the application layer. SMTP and IMAP for Email, XMPP for instant messaging, CalDAV for synchronization of calendars, ...
I had a chat with one of the IETF chairs about this a few years ago. He said the value the IETF provides is giving independent teams/companies a room to talk about how a protocol should work, so they can make their implementations compatible. If a protocol only has one vendor, the IETF doesn't add any value and isn't really interested.
If bluesky ends up getting implemented by multiple vendors, then the IETF might make sense. But its a bit early for that at this point.
I suspect the bluesky team might also be able to make big changes to the protocol in private for the time being, so they can iterate rapidly. Iterating on a protocol at the IETF would be way slower. The IETF usually takes years to publish big, complex protocols like this. Look how long it took http3 to work its way through the pipeline.
> Protocol Governance and Formal Standards Process: The current development focus is to demonstrate all the core protocol features via the reference implementation, including open federation. After that milestone, the intent is to stabilize the lower-level protocol and submit the specification for independent review and revision through a standards body such as the IETF or the W3C.
