Marketing a PDS and community

Discussion
1

This is way off topic at this point.

The work in this thread is to look at the words on the what is atmosphere and improve it. Test it with people. Translate it. Test it some more. And then link it to more themes and prose that let people dig deeper.

We’ll see if we can find a couple of people to sign up to actively lead that work.

Roughly no. The PDS is a commodity. Which is excellent. It’s cheap to run and we can think of it is a database. Databases have powered a lot of things for a long time, but they are boring tech. The starting point is absolutely not “which server should hold my account”. Pick any of them, they work everywhere, and it’s not the thing that gets you excited by itself: we’ll hand you a PDS wherever you start.

Products. Well built, designed, and articulated. With a point of view that fits a set of people. And a plan to tell people about it, and a plan to fund its operations.

I think a PDS and a member list and a couple of integrated apps and maybe a custom feed or three could be a product that is in and around groups and communities and so on.

EuroSky has gotten there and has more room to experiment. The PDS is there, and their portal shows apps, and Mu gives them a unique surface that they can showcase more things.

AtStore is one piece we can use to direct people. Even there, like EuroSky has done a great job not of saying “here are 1000 apps” but rather here are 8 or 12, that are useful, that are made in Europe, that you should be proud of.

And other than that: we do marketing. We write things. We share experiences. We cross promote. We try things. We try one thing in one culture and another in another and sometimes we’ll swap them.

We have a meetup not of our own (well, we can do a couple of those, too), but people inside every interest, who show up with the atmosphere in their pocket and a URL to get started with.

Yes, there will be a PDS buried somewhere at the bottom. But mostly, there will be people. Not platforms.

How do we talk about atproto to non-developers?
2

Thanks Boris,

Funny, Usually its the marketing guys beating up the techs. Regardless, most of our dispute is based on a difference/misunderstanding in interpreting some words. Also, a slight difference in principle.. You say “… there will be people not platforms”. I’d say “.. there will be communities not “isolated” platforms”

I’ve made the point that community members will/are naturally gravitating to the peers with which they the feel most at home. Ive offered my move from bluesky to eurosky as an individual’s example. Reasons? The Modal guys represent the values I hold most important, and the funding of European public media is very different than the US version).

JD at blacksky illustrates this natural human behaviour from a black-person-in-the-USA’s perspective. “Enter Blacksky, a Black-led platform on Atproto”. (second para in Resisting the Prison). So every PDS operator, for me, is a community hub of some description. Bluesky are the pioneers’ community hub so the most general. There are likely to be hundreds (at least) of these self-governing, and hopefully collaborating, communities.

One difficult early challenge for atproto’s techs is helping Sara, the CEO of wsocial, to understand that, just because the EC guys need a user verification based on eidas in order to break down the walls between bureaucrats and “their” communities, doesn’t mean they have to put a moat around their version of the AT protocol.

I look forward to your response. Please, let’s agree that we’re on the same side and simply working through two very different approaches towards the same ends, using evidence to back our opinions. e.g. You say “EuroSky has done a great job not of saying “here are 1000 apps”. https://eurosky.tech/

3

Yes, these are different approaches, which ended up cluttering the thread of attempting to evolve the language around atmosphere accounts, so I’ve moved us into a separate thread.

The W Social’s CEO’s name is Anna Zeiter, not Sara.

I’m pointing out that in my opinion “PDS Operators” is not a useful thing to anchor on, but rather that communities / products will be delivering a set of services that yes, likely includes a PDS for ease of signup. I’m trying to head you off at the pass of this PDS phrasing.

There are over 3500 independent PDS operators but most aren’t communities and aren’t necessarily known for “we have a PDS” ← the technical details of “what PDS are you on” is not something that I, personally, am going to work on marketing as a starting point.

So: I prefer to start with the community/product/service rather than listing a commodity component of the tech stack.

But don’t let me stop you! We need many different approaches and you’re welcome to use whatever techniques you want for marketing.

If you’re writing articles, holding meetups, or doing some other marketing or outreach activities, I’m happy to help boost them to help them spread.

There is no central person whose job this is, so everything from helping individual apps / products to more general outreach is all helpful.

4

Thanks for your patience Boris.

If you’d like to delete this one of mine it might unblock the flow. Takes a while for me to understand the local culture. Excusi. And if you could call this thread “Marketing a PDS or Building a Community? it would help us to illustrate the two perspectives.

I’ll lead with this recording of wsocial’s kickoff. Its obvious that they believe they are building a platform which is as separate as any other commercial org or PDS operator. Their main consideration, the one which distinguishes them from the other 3,500 PDS operators, is an identity check for every user that runs to the legislated trust level of eIDAS.

That’s fair enough. We all know we have to have some way of keeping the bots out. But. from a an EC bureaucrats perspective, the eIDAS legislation offers them hope they won’t have to be the meat in the sandwich forever. i.e. between the demands of unruly citizens and professional lobbyists/advocates. (particularly the US techie ones), and EU politicians.

Now wsocial guys are at least as passionate as anyone who is attracted to the promise of AT protocol’s possibilities. Probably too much, which is how they have run ahead so fast in convincing EU pollies to come onboard. Now Anna is accepting ID applications from large public institutions and treating them like Mooseheads to be mounted on the wsocial wall.

Its nice to see, although kinda defeats the whole point of “social” media which, particularly in Europe, gives the inhabitants of public institution’s an opportunity to tell (in a roundabout way) the boss to retire, or at least change their habits and expectations. Anyhow. You ,

…prefer to start with the community/product/service

IMHO the AT communities are still forming up. As a service/product provider the challenge is to identify their common demands. Cat herding is so much fun. :scream:

5

I’ve found a starting point for this discussion.

Erland has written the most exciting piece outlining where the Atmosphere is up to at this point in time; from the perspective of a software developer who needs an umbrella to work under. In a decentralised world of software developers collaborating around new protocols (at as one of the first), we are watching the invention of new institutions (as Europeans prefer to call them, orgs or corporations in US speak).

His primary point is; “We need to manage our own PDS on roomy.chat4 for seamless signups, but that PDS instance can in fact be operated by Eurosky.”

Boris says there are around 3,500 PDS operators at present. Some building software. Some building communities (is that right?). **What do they have in common?DID**s So a new global institution is needed to run the DID directory on behalf of all the PDS operators.

The most convenient way to organise and support the Atmosphere’s communities would be via an association of PDS operators who govern the needs & priorities of their member’s members.

6

The one problem with the idea of “sign up wherever you start” is that at-least-for-now the PDS is a single server for your everything account. That means all your posts, all your blogs, all your images, all your hate speech, all your kiddie porn… Oh wait how did those last two get there?! Well as a PDS operator I now need to care that you’re breaking laws and coordinate with local law enforcement, certainly to suspend accounts but also to potentially provide evidence.

Here’s the thing, if you’re running a business based on UGC then there’s a risk that someone uploads this garbage and you need moderation in some form. The problem for PDS’ is two fold.

  1. Small app view operators who want to run a PDS now take on admin duties for a much bigger surface area. Someone could post a single image on your app and then go and generate a huge volume of traffic for a competitor.
  2. Apps that want to add “atmosphere” login options, or even just atproto space based features (private data sync etc.) are running a full-fledged PDS.

This isn’t a huge problem right now because in practice there’s Bluesky and everyone else. If we get to the point where every app hosts it’s own PDS then we will hopefully get to a point where the everyone else is most of the network and the rate of PDS failure is going to go through the roof.

I do think there’s something interesting in the idea of a PDS as a social good. Honestly maybe you get one from your local library, college, ISP, or Google. Maybe a local professional association sets one up for members.
This doesn’t preclude migration, and in fact I think migrating is exactly part of the story, but the idea is that as much as possible you just have an atmosphere account before you even get to that first app.

Leaning on associations and particularly local in-person associations is an interesting notion for me, in part because it adds a real element of “shame” that’s been missing from the internet for a while now. I realize that there’s plenty of marginalized people who are happy to be anonymous online and where this is a good thing for their health, but we’ve also seen the people who would never say that out loud finding each other in the dark corners of the net.

7

Many thanks for the concise overview from a (small) PDS operator’s perspective Chris.

You’ve been very explicit about the point I was trying to make. Its a little hard to explain ATproto when its institutions (i.e. a large, established organization, a foundational custom, or a set of rules that shapes social behavior) aren’t in place yet.

You can see a strategy unfolding now. Boris pointed us at the last AT conference. (N.B. Conference organisers are the strategists of a communities’ progress.) So I did jump out of my skin when I heard about the ATP Swiss Association. Q: Association of whom? A: PDS operators. There’s the beginnings of what is going to be the main GLOBAL influencer of ATP’s next steps from the ID, accounts, and the legals for PDS operators’ perspective.

The other layer (below that) = focussing on individual communities = is best illustrated by Trezy’s approach to the Gaming communities (he calls them an industries which I like). He describes the situation for any ATP “community steward”. They haven’t the capability to undertake the legalities and their enforcement (which are going to get pretty heavy once the existing commercial gatekeepers see they are about to be “disintermediated”. (Trezy points at the Amazon/Twitch example).

Next steps? We really do need to encourage discussions between PDS operators; large and small. Although the main one needs to be between the CEOs of Bluesky and wsocial. Never seen two orgs want the same things and independently, display the same suspicions of the media culture they are attempting to unite, with the same protocol.