atproto and ownership of identity

The new age of social-enabled apps

atproto is very exciting to me as it’s the perfect abstraction between the identity and user data layer, and the application layer. Compare that to the fediverse and some striking differences become apparent.

On the fediverse, your application—Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, whatever—and your user account are tied together. Your presence on say fosstodon.org isn’t the same as what you’d use on Lemmy. This is partially due to both services implementing entirely different schemas of the ActivityPub spec¹, and due to how AP addressing works: so @user@fosstodon.org is fundamentally distinct from @user@lemmy.ml.

atproto solves this using Personal Data Servers (PDS)² and domain-based identities. This now allows for two levels of ownership:

1. Ownership of identity: Use your own domain and now that’s your account across all of atproto.
2. Ownership of data: Run your own PDS and store all of your data yourself.

Thanks to this, users can re-use the same DID across other apps built on atproto. Consequently, new social apps have their two biggest problems solved for free:

1. The need for a new account (for users), and
2. The social graph.

This paves the way for all kinds of new “social-enabled” services to emerge: forums, long-form writing, and potentially even more complex ones like code forges and more—all sharing the same account. The same behavior is rather cumbersome in the above fediverse model because of poor interoperability and lack of unified identity.

Further, the separation of the app and user layers now allows for building “apps” that are viable businesses. The app layer can be a monetized service much like Bluesky’s supposed “premium” model that’s in the works. This is a good thing—a financially viable open network is one that sticks around longer.

There’s also signs of early VC interest in atproto. skyseed.fund is a fund focused solely on backing atproto projects. I predict this is the first of many. Given that building on atproto is so much easier than building a traditional social app from ground up, startups here can be small and scrappy without needing much seed capital to take off. Bluesky already having done the hard part of acquiring its 27M strong userbase, as of this writing, is the icing on the cake.

So yes, bottom line, I think atproto has a promising future. There’s a ton of cool stuff being built atop it already and as the network and protocol improve, I predict a new age of social apps with user-owned identity at its core.

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