some thoughts on atproto as a post-app paradigm

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

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

There's lots I haven't yet understood about atproto, but I simply won't do the standard.site thing whilst it offers a worse UX than… not doing it.

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

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.

while the permissionlessness vector of atproto will certainly enable new things we can't imagine the pattern of "____ but on atproto" is key for taking our daily lives back. a framing i prefer is "i can now do {boringDailyLifeThing} without {shittyExtractiveApp}"

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.

the single most important part of atproto is the PDS as a user-controlled auth and storage layer to which clients can connect directly. death to appviews

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.

while the permissionlessness vector of atproto will certainly enable new things we can't imagine the pattern of "____ but on atproto" is key for taking our daily lives back. a framing i prefer is "i can now do {boringDailyLifeThing} without {shittyExtractiveApp}"

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.

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…

Does atproto make a company non acquirable? All you buy is an install base that can move, an app view maybe, and the team Without a moat what are you actually buying?