atproto and ownership of identity

atproto is very exciting to me as it’s the perfect abstraction between the identity and user data layer, and the application layer. Compare that to the fediverse and some striking differences become apparent.

On the fediverse, your application—Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, whatever—and your user account are tied together. Your presence on say fosstodon.org isn’t the same as what you’d use on Lemmy. This is partially due to both services implementing entirely different schemas of the ActivityPub spec1, and due to how AP addressing works: so @user@fosstodon.org is fundamentally distinct from @user@lemmy.ml.

atproto solves this using Personal Data Servers (PDS)2 and domain-based identities. This now allows for two levels of ownership:

Thanks to this, users can re-use the same DID across other apps built on atproto. Consequently, new social apps have their two biggest problems solved for free:

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