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

The fundamental strength of ATProto — and why I think it'll last — is that it is designed first and foremost to be built upon, by anyone, for any reason, rather than locking into one specific paradigm of its maintainers' choosing. Also tbh sex workers are the social media Mandate of Heaven, so.

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

i want to do a little ✨ ama about atproto ✨ in this thread. no question is too simple if you’ve been curious about atproto but don’t know much (anything?) about it, ask any question and i’ll try to explain it in my own words. (+ would love to hear from friends who aren’t very active on bsky)

I want people to be comfortable paying for an atproto account (ie. space on a PDS) It’s the bedrock of everything we’re building; if it’s not funded it’ll get squeezed in ways that are bad for users (hi Gmail) We should normalise having (very cheap) paid-tier PDS accounts on the services we build

Frankly atproto is a great technology that just has yet to really be successfully productized. A few orgs are putting real work into that productization now but only time will tell if it succeeds.

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.

"atProtocol" was previously trademarked by another company. bluesky pbc now owns it, but it should probably be handed off ASAP. but details TBD. IMHO if the power could be removed from any party (eg, via clever licensing) that would be better than using it as leverage even by a "good" org

i want to do a little ✨ ama about atproto ✨ in this thread. no question is too simple if you’ve been curious about atproto but don’t know much (anything?) about it, ask any question and i’ll try to explain it in my own words. (+ would love to hear from friends who aren’t very active on bsky)