My photos live in Google Photos, Apple Photos, and an external SSD.
My docs live in Google Docs, some files downloaded to my desktop, and others in iCloud.
My workouts live in Strava, Apple Health and did, at one time also live in Garmin.
My blogposts live in my PDS. I say my PDS, because, while it’s my Personal Data, in reality I don’t own the Server. I could own a Server which hosts my Personal Data, but that’s a story for another time.
Point is, my data - things I’ve created, written, captured and chosen to either share – or not share – all live in the place of the tool I’ve used, at the time I’ve needed, or wanted to use it.
One account for everything
I think we might, in the AT Proto dev community, simultaneously clearly understand this for ourselves, and have it somewhat, to absolutely backwards for communicating to other, less technically minded folks, about the benefits of having “one account, for everything”.
Don’t get me wrong, the benefits of having all my data live in one place would be great. But right now, that’s not the case for me; and if we look at how people use the internet today, I’m sure for most folks, having an AT Proto account is just going to be “one more account”, rather than “the last account you’ll ever need”.
I’ve signed up to tens of AT Proto apps. I’ve used a lot of AT Proto apps. All the data is in that one PDS right now, and that’s because I have a single AT Proto account that I use, and understand the benefits of having one account for all this shared storage - how AT Proto works.
I might very well be underestimating the case here, but most people who use the internet probably don’t care where their data is stored, as long as they have access to it. It’s that piece – getting access when they need to, that’s the crux of the matter for most of us who care.
Most mainstream users I know, appreciate and use the convenience of Sign in with Google, Sign in with Facebook, and Sign in with Apple - among a few of the most common options offered on modern SaaS platforms. Users know the name and the logo, and the platforms have become familiar enough to have earned a user’s trust.
I think we need to align on making Sign in with Atmosphere, with a common Call to Action button. One that looks like it fits in alongside Sign in with Google, Facebook, Apple, and the others that have reached a pervasive level of support. I have an idea about this, and I’m hopeful to share an implementation of it, in a few days.
Solving the Cold Start
For AT Proto, there’s a clear cold-start problem. How do we tell people about this new account they have, that works everywhere?
I think part of the issue, for our cold-start problem - the biggest problem is we’re trying to boil the ocean. We’re trying to get people to sign up to a service that uses AT Proto data, and to do that, we’re trying to explain what that means.
But if you go to Instagram, they don’t explain how data is stored, how login works, and what it means to be able to login to Threads with your Instagram account. They focus on getting users to sign up, and follow accounts to see photos and videos of things they’re interested in seeing.
We need to change our thinking, and look at the problem we’re, the developers are trying to solve, namely: growing the ecosystem.
We know each Atmosphere account, created for any AT Proto service means a new Atmosphere account for every AT Proto service.
Right here is where we need to separate the interests of two groups - the user who just signed up for tangled.org to use the Tangled Git forge; and every other AT Proto service that now has an opportunity to permit that user to use their service too.
I’ve buried the lede, and I’ve repeated this a few times in a few posts and replies on Bluesky over the past few weeks. I think there is one short term solution sitting in plain sight. Bluesky solved the cold-start problem by hosting an account, a user’s PDS, on their own Bluesky PDS hosting service.
A collection of well named mushroom instances hold the vast majority of Atmosphere accounts, not only for Bluesky data, for AT Proto data in general. Some critics refer to this as part of the reason “Bluesky is centralized”. (While I understand the argument that this makes “Bluesky” centralized, I don’t buy it).
It’s fantastic to see other AT Proto based services, like Black Sky Algorithms, North Sky, and others, offer PDS hosting for users that sign up to their services.
I think this is the solution. Any service built to on AT Proto should offer their users a chance to sign up, and either have an account hosted on a PDS hosted by that service, or at least offer a sensible default using the sign-up flow like @hipstersmoothie.com pointed out in this blog post from June - https://hipstersmoothie.com/blog/posts/designing-a-login-page.
Of course, hosting a PDS can a large undertaking. It can be expensive to run the server, and store the blobs. Bailey estimates $50 USD a month and could scale to 25,000 accounts on selfhosted.social - https://bsky.app/profile/pds.dad/post/3mfv6gb33nk27
$600 a year to host accounts? That’s not bad for a SaaS making money. For people starting out with a small service, that cost is not nothing, and doesn’t include the time taken to moderate rogue accounts.
Infrastructure
For the cost side at least, I think that’s part of the genius of @protobase.at and @happyview.dev.
Protobase is a PDS hosting service, allowing Atmosphere service creators to offer account creation workflows attached to their service, with the full access to the whole Atmosphere.
@trezy.codes has been building @HappyView.dev for the past several months, and just this week has been riffing on how he might end up with HappyView inception.
https://bsky.app/profile/trezy.codes/post/3munsdivz2s2h
I think one more step along the way could come in the shape of a collaboration from HappyView and Protobase.
Start a HappyView instance, and get a Protobase hosted PDS instance for all your users. Take away the friction of explaining what the Atmosphere, and we can work to gradually reveal the part where every account is an Atmosphere account that can be used all over.
Just this morning, I came across @cove.town which offers a PDS, Knot, Spindle and Hold. This too seems like an opportunity for supporting infrastructure that can be scaled to onboard more people into the Atmosphere.
If you’ll pardon the pun, I suppose our barometer of success here will be when we see increases in PDS accounts with multiple record types across the atmosphere.
Unifying multiple accounts
One piece of this gradual reveal around Atmosphere accounts, is that people might end up with one Atmosphere account for their code on https://tangled.org, a second for their https://blacksky.community, and a third for https://grain.social photos.
I think we’re worried about people not knowing they can have one PDS that can be used in all 3 places. I say, it’s better to have 1 person with 3 Atmosphere accounts on separate 3 PDSs, than it is to not have them on the Atmosphere at all.
We can put our heads together and figure out moving data from one PDS to another - unifying Atmosphere accounts into a single PDS.
Perhaps there’s some restrictions of what data can be, and can’t be moved from one account to another. Spaces springs to mind as something that might need to be unpacked a bit more.
I might have this backwards, and I’m sure a lot of my thinking here is incomplete, and missing some nuances along the way.
This post took long enough for me to get together, I managed to nerd snipe myself into building an attempt at a different solution, I’ll share a bit more soon!