the point of atproto is to make locked-open apps. apps which are constrained such that they cannot be e.g. bought by billionaires and ruined. yes, doing non-atproto things "enables app developers to do more". yes, non-atproto is "more intuitive" and "it sucks" when you hit atproto's limits.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What's the intended app/user etiquette for atproto apps with regards to publishing to the same lexicon? Like, say I build an atproto app, would it catch users by surprise if the wrote to the same records (e.g. posts, likes, etc?) that show up in the bsky.app? Or should my app be isolated?