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 thinking about how non-developers will feel about atproto. For example, will it take people by surprise that data entered into one app can show up somewhere else? More thoughts in this post.

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.

ATProto, by design, refuses to be the place where things happen. Decisions live in apps. Value derives from execution, and execution will demand focus. This is application primacy — and it's why I don't expect an ATmospheric "everything app": numergent.com/2026-05/ATProto-Application-P…

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

the hard pill to swallow is that 99% of people do not care about whether an app is on "atproto" or if its "decentralized" so long as it works you will not sell the decentralization aspect if your app runs like shit and isn't fun to use even moreso if it's VC Claude slop which is 90% of atproto ww

hard pill to swallow for atproto developers/creators: 99% of potential users either do not care about, value, understand, or want to “own their own data” i see so many apps/projects lead with this “value prop”, but it’s not an important or meaningful consideration for most people

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

Too many of y’all get the shape of atproto fundamentally incorrect, thinking it’s about “data ownership,” but it’s literally never been about that, and if you keep banging that drum, you’ll miss the point, just like we have every other time.

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

Someone recently announced a “restaurant listings/menus on atproto so they can own their own data”, and as someone who used to do engineering for OpenTable, let me tell you that project is not solving a problem that restaurants actually have. Owning your own data is an anti-value prop for many orgs.

There are many things being built on atproto. Many of them won’t get adopted or thrive. And yes, many are built without user research. It’s OK? Don’t use things you don’t want to. Promote things you like. And build something yourself if you feel like it. Do it the way YOU want it to be.

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

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