some thoughts on atproto as a post-app paradigm

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Some initial atproto-related learnings from #Rebuild Helsinki 🇫🇮 * most people building apps here have no idea what atproto is, which is a shame since especially when building social apps, atproto is a great starting point for many reasons

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.

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

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

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.