The beauty of AT Protocol is that all of your data from different apps is available on your PDS, your own folder on the internet containing your stuff as JSON. This means that you can switch which app you use to view that data, without losing anything. It also makes it very easy to make connections between data stored using different lexicons, or just display activity in one place. Sifa does a nice job of this on your profile page. For web developers, and people who understand webhosting, the concept is reasonably easy to understand. I know that any atproto app I join is going to store data in my PDS, any other people will be able to see it.

However, for atproto to really succeed it needs to go mainstream. The general public are less likely to understand what it means to have this folder of information on the internet. They may not realise that using a collection of different apps means that they are creating an easily viewed paper trail of their activity on the web. They may not expect that another app can display their data. So as I explore the Atmosphere, and experiment with making my own app, I’m wondering if anyone is thinking about how we should message this to users.

I’m not thinking here about private data, and I know that there’s a separate conversation happening about that. I’m talking about data that is intended to be public, and making sure that users understand. This will be a completely new idea to many people, and the “it’s like your webhosting” explanation isn’t going to resonate with someone who has only ever published to the web in a walled garden. With obvious social apps like Bluesky, users are likely to understand that their posts are public. That expectation may be less for other types of apps where users might reasonably expect their data to be private unless they share it, and would be very surprised to see it appear on some other app without their explicit permission.

It would be good to have some common guidelines for app developers as to what to tell users, and to develop explanations for a non-technical audience. Is anyone working on that? If so, I’d love to get involved.