On the one hand, SV-speak has trained me to read acquisitions as an end of good stuff. On the other, if this ATProto experiment really is something different, we need to be willing to consider that old patterns don't hold and expect something better.
one fundamental issue in atproto is the missing permissions layer, the proposal is insufficient for many use cases, graze was shut out of their main financial path by Bluesky (paid creator posts, Bluesky cut off talks)
tl;dr - people want control and privacy, not an open anonymous read all the data in the world, foundation for their online social activities, and this needs to be core to a protocol
I've also been holding off from jumping into building on AT proto for exactly that "no one wants all their data to be as public as possible" reason, but private data is now in alpha which is a meaningful step towards solving that: https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha
I like the optimistic track.
tl;dr - people want control and privacy, not an open anonymous read all the data in the world, foundation for their online social activities, and this needs to be core to a protocol
Congrats to the current team, excited to see where this goes as FB coalesces the social web