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There’s some conversation in the Atmosphere right now about how we turn @atproto.com projects into sustainable businesses. One of the biggest opportunities is sitting right in front of us: give publishers back the audience development business they spent the last 20 years outsourcing to platforms.

Publishers didn’t make Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. powerful by accident. They supplied an enormous amount of the material those platforms organized attention around—and then spent years optimizing their own organizations to send audiences back into them.

Over time, the platforms captured more of the relationship, the data and the economics. The emergence of ATProto creates the possibility of a very different bargain. Publishers can participate in a shared social ecosystem w/out surrendering audience to the monopolies controlling the distribution.

That suggests a business model for third-party devs: don’t build another intermediary whose business depends on capturing the publisher’s audience. Build the tools that help publishers take it back: identity, discovery, analytics, conversation, moderation, audience intelligence, distribution and...

monetization on top of the open protocol. The interesting thing is that publishers already have enormous collective power here. Platforms need the continuous production and circulation of things worth paying attention to. Publishers produce a huge share of those things.

If enough publishers begin treating the open social web as shared infrastructure rather than treating proprietary platforms as mandatory distribution channels, the balance of power changes.