Every lexicon, every "app" on ATProto is a "yes and" waiting for your contribution to the vision. We're all first party developers.

I'm going to be launching something pretty big next week, which just happens to include a new atproto AppView, labeler, blob proxy, lexicons. It will have tens of thousands of users, most of whom won't even know they're using atproto, or have even heard of it.

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.

some thoughts on atproto as a post-app paradigm

also, I kinda feel like calling the things that consume atproto data "apps" does a disservice to understanding what they are / how they work / what their potential is. But that is a partially-formed hot take I can't fully defend yet.

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

What if, for a year, we as atproto community focus on improving a major community lexicon every month We improve the hell out of it (if needed) and then integrate into existing apps where it makes sense and help each other to do so

the open ecosystem for atproto makes it super easy for one developer to build a compelling and feature rich application in their free time that cannot possibly be maintained by one developer in their free time

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

Hot take but I think it’s problematic for atproto that lots of developers i see talking about making stuff focus mostly on things absolutely no end user gives a shit about to fuel their protocols and architecture fetish, and it’s a failure there isn’t another app with like 100k+ users active even.

Some thoughts on why ATProto is so exciting from the perspective of what it could unlock software dev wise.

I still think the biggest perk of atproto for everyday devs is not the decentralization, but things like - Handles auth, with good standards to check that auth and build permission layers. - A free public key/value database. - Can build api clients and some of the backend with lexicon schemas

There are two theories-of-change emerging: displace vs. integrate They are by no means mutually exclusive, but much more effort has gone into spinning up brand new atproto apps with the goal to displace existing apps than has gone into embedding the protocol into every nook and cranny of the web.