some thoughts on atproto as a post-app paradigm

Imagining atproto as a post-app protocol starts with materializing the social filesystem – decomposing apps and their data into materials and instruments. For the time being, this guestbook is a good example where the display element is a material and the sign element is an instrument.

I'm building on atproto because I think that a single social network has essentially no shot of dethroning the current tech monopolies. But an open ecosystem of interoperating apps is so infinitely more interesting than legacy social that it seems almost inevitable it will win

difficult to imagine atproto apps building to significant revenue in a world where you can just clone any given app in an afternoon & still access the backing data

difficult to imagine atproto apps building to significant revenue in a world where you can just clone any given app in an afternoon & still access the backing data

some thoughts on atproto as a post-app paradigm

I love that the design of atproto was in part inspired by big social Kafka and ScyllaDB server backends and @martin.kleppmann.com's Designing Data-Intensive Applications and the community immediately used it to implement thousands of apps with no backend lol

My take on the "explaining atproto" discourse is that all the UX/filesystem/etc metaphors are still very verbose and that you can explain the same idea in a lot less words: It separates data from apps, so any app can use data from any other app. That fits in a tweet, with other sentences around it.

ATProto is a post-app protocol trapped in a world of apps. I can feel it all around the edges of the network.

what is our “moat” on atproto even? what keeps people using a specific atproto app vs a fully compatible other app?

one thing I really like about atproto is that it provides the infrastructure needed to make open source user apps that actually fucking sync data across devices sorry but the average random hobbyist is absolutely not going to run a user account server for their homebrew todo list app

I mean, basically yeah! This is the atproto database I've been playing with lately.

This is partly why I think atproto needs a more convincing vision about being a post-app protocol. A future where atproto is a bunch of apps and each app governs their own lexicon diminishes a lot of its potential in the long-term.