Feature Request: CBOR serialization support

[rektide]

It would be lovely to supplement existing MessagePack support with additional CBOR serialization support too.

[xe-nvdk]

Hey @rektide,

Thanks for the suggestion. Before we prioritize this, can you share your use case?

Specifically:

• What's your deployment scenario where CBOR > MessagePack?
• What problem does CBOR solve that MessagePack doesn't for you?
• Are you already using CBOR elsewhere in your stack?

We're focused on features with clear production use cases, so understanding the "why" helps us prioritize correctly.

Ignacio

[rektide]

I'd like to be able to work more directly with tht atprotocol, which is a very popular open social media protocol that is cbor based.

Arc would be able to integrate much more naturally if there was cbor support, if it could read cbors natively.

This link is a lot. I don't expect anyone to read grok it fully! But for informational purposes, here's a at protocol's write up on their data model: https://atproto.com/specs/data-model

I definitely wouldn't try to push too hard on this feature, but it would be a very cool feature that would help working with a very interesting very cool realtime data source. If there's a low priority tag I would not be insulted. Wishlist?

[xe-nvdk]

Thanks for the context @rektide — the AT Protocol use case is interesting, and we appreciate you taking the time to explain it.

Right now CBOR support isn't on our near-term roadmap, but we're keeping this on file. If we see more demand for CBOR ingestion — whether from the AT Protocol community or other use cases — we'll revisit it.

In the meantime, a lightweight adapter that deserializes CBOR to JSON or MessagePack before sending to Arc would be a practical workaround. MessagePack and CBOR are structurally similar enough that the conversion should be straightforward.

Thanks again for the suggestion — we genuinely appreciate the feedback.