the power of software compels you! - n8

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

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

It's hard for non-technical people to understand that #atproto (Bluesky, and friends) really is a different breed of social software. One where our data, and connections are no longer taken hostage by the platform and we're free to store our data wherever we want

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.

Too many of y’all get the shape of atproto fundamentally incorrect, thinking it’s about “data ownership,” but it’s literally never been about that, and if you keep banging that drum, you’ll miss the point, just like we have every other time.

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

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.

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

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.

#atproto does not need to win only by convincing people to post somewhere new. It can win by becoming the foundation for software people already need to use because of real-world relationship woodys-rows.pckt.blog/open-forks-of-boring-apps-wit…