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 atproto as a post-app paradigm

It seems a fork lies ahead, is atproto a portable database for a bunch of apps or a new type of post-app, social filesystem?

The vector for new signups of atproto accounts is apps. Adoption is unlikely to come through just one app. A “drive” app would actually make sense and I have some ideas there but I think it will be varied. A lot of different apps can get big - from recipes to events to whatever.

Odoo has this toggle of showing their apps / what apps you can build or replace. They list 40K+ "community apps" And yes, also open source github.com/odoo/odoo With private data, likely good opportunities for atproto, too.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.