i like seeing a bit of the raw, low-level protocol first. a few curl examples are perfect for understanding what’s really happening under the hood. once i get that, i'm happy to use a library to handle all the edge cases.

but starting with a library tutorial makes me wonder how many stacks of turtles are being hidden. if i can see the turtles upfront, i'll appreciate what the library does for me -- and i'll have a better sense of how to debug when things break.

Absolutely. I think it’s a great constraint actually. I have a few other pieces in the backlog but I’ll keep this one in mind.

This isn’t quite what you want but should illuminate at least the “fetch on demand” part in detail: https://overreacted.io/where-its-at/

yeah, that looks like a good base for a simplified remix. thanks!

everything we need to authenticate the msg should exist in the msg. sig => timestamp, hash