The ATmosphere community should value being more colorful and playful

There's been more discussion lately that maybe "data ownership" should not really be a core selling point when it comes to the AT Protocol, and I want to share my personal opinion on what it should be instead.

My own personal issues with emphasizing "data ownership" is that it often seems to have a habit of treating the more fun, playful aspects of the AT Protocol as nice but not-really-too-important while treating what many people see as pretty niche technical concerns as core selling points, and it's my own opinion that it should really be the other way around, because while I imagine that approach may seem less serious for some people, I really think it could win over more people than they might think.

I'm gonna bring up the more traditionalist parts of the indie web scene (e.g. Neocities, Bear Blog) as an example. It seems to me that they have a rather different view on what a more open internet means/should be compared to the "data ownership" or "[blank] on Atproto" people, and if I'm being honest, even if I don't just want the internet to go back to what it was in the 1990s/2000s, I kinda prefer the former over the latter.

The "[blank] on Atproto" people are basically aiming to create a version of the 2010s/early 2020s internet but more "enshittification-proof", basically acting like what went wrong was just some technical/business constraints that, when removed, would automatically result in something that most people would want to use and enjoy, as if many of the ideas surrounding those platforms back then were sound and just needed some better technology behind them.

The more conservative indie web people seem to have come up with a slightly more radical conclusion, that a lot of those ideas, even "pre-enshittification", kind of always sucked and that it might be best to outright replace them with something else if we want a better internet. What they propose is letting users be as playful and personal as they want with they're online lives, just like back in the old days; as in, screw 'clean' looking UIs, engagement metrics and all-in-one recommendation feeds, because to many of them those are the more important reasons why people ended up unhappy than the lack of "data ownership" or whatever.

And the thing is that, while Neocities and others like it may be pretty niche, they're still very much thriving, much of which is thanks to those who were too young to remember that original Web and yet ended up so disenchanted with the post-2012 status quo that they decided it would be best to learn some HTML and just have some actual fun online.

I'm not sure most of the "[blank] on Atproto" projects would really generate that kind of enthusiasm. The thing is that, even among the unhappy users the "[blank] on Atproto" people are targeting, there doesn't seem to be much appetite for 'better' imitations. The desire among many, even including a lot of 'normies', doesn't seem to be to eventually leave sites like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok specifically, but to eventually leave "social media" as a whole. It seems the main reason they feel stuck is that they don't actually want to abandon the whole internet but also mostly don't really know yet what exactly we should replace "social media" with.

Really, even if I imagine the average person has not become quite as conservative about how the internet should work, I think there's a chance that it shows that the sort of values shared by the traditionalists may now not actually be quite as niche as people might think. When given something that allows for a more fun and colorful online experience in a more accessible way (i.e. without having to learn a lot of HTML), a lot of people may end up loving it.

And I think the AT Protocol really has the potential to provide people with a more fun and personalized online experience. Given it's very free-form nature, I think the sort of interoperability it provides should not just be sold as a way to easily distance yourself from companies that start making bad choices. That's a nice feature to have, but to reference this post, that's not too dissimilar from trying to sell people things like car insurance. Instead, I think it should primarily be seen as a means to unleash a lot of genuine creativity and playfulness when it comes to clients, creating stuff that goes beyond what people over the past 14 years have thought of as "social media".

Basically, instead of trying to make more 'ethical' copies of the sites and formats that many are just plain tired of, we should be emphasizing genuinely new, fun sites and formats that have the potential to be some very desperately needed breaths of fresh air for a lot of people.

And it's not like there aren't ATmosphere devs who prefer to just have fun and make cool new stuff over trying to recreate the 2010s internet but "de-enshittified"; it's just that it seems like many other AT devs have been rather slow to adopt that more down-to-earth, playful attitude. I'm glad there's been a bit more criticism of things like the "[blank] on Atproto" strategy recently, and I do hope it eventually leads to more devs better embracing the sort of values I'm describing here.