the power of software compels you!

morally, the user-choice story offered by open social compels me

so it compels those who love me enough to listen to my extendo-yap on why user-choice and data ownership is important for all society

i find this yapping universally necessary to compel the uninitiated. its not that (all) listeners/normies are intellectually complacent or lacking in some objectively good quality that would make them more receptive. they just don't, for whatever highly idiosyncratic reason, have the space in their life to care about this niche corner of "tech"

and so the punchline of this article is

atproto cannot rely on moral claims to proliferate and thrive

we must build virtual experiences that are genuinely compelling to those who have never heard of or would not be receptive to the moral/philosophical/technological underbelly of atproto.

it's wonderful if atproto apps have an advantage in providing these compelling experiences because of the properties of the protocol.

it's wonderful if there actually is a small slice of people who are disenfranchised by the attention economy or otherwise receptive to the moral claim that atproto provides user-choice and autonomy.

{Foo} on atproto needs to be better for normies than {Foo}

this is an impossible ask, {Foo} is funded by {Bar}

maybe! maybe not! i think the fact that we're building on a common substrate makes it very possible for relatively small groups of people to make highly compounding efforts to build communal infrastructure for social / virtual experiences.

even if this is unattainable in some cases (likely many), i think this should be the goal by default for {Foo} on atproto.

e.g. i thought plyr.fm would have to facilitate monetary transactions directly (down the road, to allow artists to paywall content Patreon style to their verifiable supporters), but now i might just have to integrate with atprotofans.com (or whoever the torchbearer is here)

The moral claim can still be an accelerator!

ask anyone (besides that one Fox-News-corrupted uncle of yours) these questions:

Do you prefer Spotify with or without AI military drone investment?

Would you prefer FB Marketplace with or without Mark Zuckerberg?

the universality of discontent / cat-tied-to-a-stick feeling here makes me wholeheartedly believe that there is real societal potential energy to be tapped into.

i think that's why the whole "internet handle" discourse is so enticing, bc its a proxy argument for how to distill all of atproto's claim into a login page blurb. i say, that's not possible and we should not try to do that

Bill Hader mode

When people tell you what doesn't work, they're usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're usually wrong.

i think we follow up to the moral preference questions above with:

why exactly don't you leave {Foo} then?

and this is where we need to listen:

why is it hard to leave?

what would compel you to leave?

listen to the pain. back out the general problems to solve.

solve them! ship it! quickslice it perhaps!

so, in sum

what's the pain you're solving, and why would someone who doesn't care about atproto still choose your thing?

P.S.

this is not meant to say that working on messaging is not worthwhile, i'm just saying its fraught if the experiences sold by the messaging are not as/more compelling than alternatives.