Here’s the thing with ATproto: It’s very impressive from a technical perspective.
If you begin to grasp what this protocol enables, you’ll inevitably become a fan (at least you should in my opinion).
Posts like “A Social Filesystem” by Dan Abramov that capture this notion of “formats over apps” give a glimpse into what will become possible, once more apps are being built on the protocol. It’s gonna be awesome!
But here’s the other thing: Most non-techies probably don’t care that much about “owning their data”, “migrating a PDS” or “decentralized architecture”. That’s also the reason why, at least from my perspective, Mastodon never really took off apart from small, often tech-related, communities. For normal people, these kinds of phrases are just buzzwords that don’t mean much.
Making the benefits of the Atmosphere clear is mainly a UX problem. And I think that talking about it as having an “Everything Account” like Anuj Ahooja does is a step in the right direction.
People know how “Sign in with Google” works. “Sign in with ATproto” will, to them, just be another option for signing in to apps.
But then they discover the added benefits:
“Wow, all my friends from app A are already here on app B? How cool is that!”
“My photos I uploaded on this platform that got really bad recently are on here as well? Nice, I don’t have to re-upload everything!”
You don’t have to know what a PDS is and how the data is shared between apps to get its benefits.
The “Everything Account” and by extension the “Internet Handle” (although that maybe gets too technical again) are the most convincing arguments for betting on ATproto right now.
Because people care more about the fact that they can use their beloved handle anywhere instead of which server their data is exactly hosted on.
No more dominik03 accounts, just dominik.social everywhere.