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

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…

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.

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 atproto as a post-app paradigm

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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}"