disclosure: building a substack competitor on atproto
I'm really excited for ATProto as a way to build applications that let you have the benefits of substack (a unified network, recommendations, social features like comments, etc) without the eventual path to lock in.
It's particularly exciting because the incentive is actually there to build an application this way. Whether Bluesky is growing or not, there are currently 30M accounts that you can reach (with one of the best auth systems I've interacted with), AND atproto gives you the building blocks for others to build on your work. Both these things make the bootstrapping problem for any social application way down.
There's still a lot of stuff missing, payments being a big (and gnarly one), notification management being another, but both the bluesky team and the overall ecosystem has been moving at a solid pace, and things are getting more viable by the day.
I'm really excited for ATProto as a way to build applications that let you have the benefits of substack (a unified network, recommendations, social features like comments, etc) without the eventual path to lock in.
It's particularly exciting because the incentive is actually there to build an application this way. Whether Bluesky is growing or not, there are currently 30M accounts that you can reach (with one of the best auth systems I've interacted with), AND atproto gives you the building blocks for others to build on your work. Both these things make the bootstrapping problem for any social application way down.
There's still a lot of stuff missing, payments being a big (and gnarly one), notification management being another, but both the bluesky team and the overall ecosystem has been moving at a solid pace, and things are getting more viable by the day.