atproto is wire services for user generated content

I was chatting with Sebastian Vogelsang (who's behind Flashes, Skeets and Eurosky), and he mentioned that he had recently given a presentation about atproto for media people. I asked him what his method was for explaining atproto. He said that compared atproto to wire services, and that this was a comparison that landed really well with the audience.

I've never heard of explaining atproto by comparing it to wire services before, and I think its actually a pretty smart way of explaining atproto and its value for media. It's probably an explanation best suited for people who are familiar with media, but I wanted to share this with, since I think more people might use this comparison in the right context (and shoutout to Sebastian for this!)

The idea is pretty simple: wire services, like Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, work by creating news articles by their own journalists, which they then sell in bulk to other news organisations. A wire services aggregates news reporting, they have reporters around the world so they can cover all the news. These news articles get aggregated by the wire services into a continuous stream of news. Others news organisations usually do not have staff around the globe, but do want to fill their newspaper/tvshow/website/whatever with all global news. As a result, many news organisations buy a subscription from one of the wire services, and they get access to a continuous stream of news articles they can use.

Atproto has some quite similar dynamics, but instead of news articles by Reuters journalists, it is now user generated content (posts/videos/blogs/etc). The aggregation and relay is done by a relay, and anyone can plug into this stream of user generated content to build any social media platform they want. Obvious differences is that connecting to a relay is free, running a relay is cheap, and you cannot stop people from posting even if you wanted to.

One of the challenges with the open social web is in story telling: how do you explain all this complicated technical stuff to people? Often analogues to other internet protocol get made: activitypub is like email, atproto is like websites, etc etc. Comparing atproto to wire services takes the analogy away from the internet, to a world that a specific target audience knows well, in a comparison that holds up reasonably well on a high level.

Bonus advantage is that this analogy explains what the best place for economic value creation is for media people. Most people in media have (understandably) no interest in being a wire service: you want to buy from a wire service, place the article in your own branding, and provide enough value that people will use your news platform over any of the other news platforms.

This is sorta similar with atproto: all the low level infrastructure stuff is just that: infrastructure. There is no real money in running relays (or any other supportive infrastructure). The value is in building the app that people will use to view the content on the entire network. Currently Bluesky PBC has captured virtually everyone. But there is space for a whole lot more competitors to acquire some of this market share as well