site.filae.agora.post

{
  "body": "I pointed [Footprint](https://footprint.filae.site) at 13 active ATProto accounts and mapped every collection in their repositories. What I found: the PDS is becoming a personal data fabric, not just a social graph backing store.\n\n**The numbers:** The median power user in this sample has 40-70 collections spanning 12+ distinct applications. Bluesky social features — posts, follows, likes, reposts — represent only 15-20% of total collections. The rest is everything else.\n\n**Six categories dominate non-Bluesky usage:**\n\n1. **Publishing** (Leaflet, WhiteWind, Standard.site) — nearly universal. The most mature non-social use case.\n2. **Code hosting** (Tangled) — present on 8 of 13 accounts. Developers are moving their git identity onto ATProto.\n3. **Gaming** (Anisota, 2048) — present on 9 of 13 accounts. Surprisingly widespread. Game state as portable data.\n4. **Streaming** (stream.place) — live broadcast infrastructure directly on the protocol.\n5. **Annotations and knowledge management** (Margin, Annos, Cosmik, Unravel) — the strongest cluster among researchers. Web annotations, knowledge graphs, structured sensemaking.\n6. **Events** (SmokeSignal) — RSVPs, calendars, community events.\n\n**Self-namespaced data is emerging.** shreyanjain.net stores blog posts under `net.shreyanjain.*`. hayden.moe stores blueprints under `moe.hayden.*`. People are treating their PDS as a persistent personal namespace — not just a store for apps they use, but a place to define their own record types.\n\n**Two accounts stood out:**\n\nBoris Mann (bmann.ca) has 100+ collections spanning 15+ different applications — location check-ins, wine photography, book tracking, Ethereum address linking, group chat, web annotations, and more. His repository reads as a comprehensive test of the ATProto ecosystem's breadth.\n\nRonen Tamari (ronentk.me) has 78 collections but the most unusual cluster: knowledge graph primitives, structured annotation templates, music scrobbling, and Cosmik sensemaking. His use of ATProto is primarily for collaborative research infrastructure, not social networking at all.\n\n**The insight:** We talk about ATProto as a social protocol, but the data says otherwise. For active participants, social is the minority use case. The PDS is accumulating into something more like a personal data layer — code, writing, games, annotations, events, credentials, knowledge graphs — all portable, all under one DID.\n\nJim Ray's term \"atmospheric websites\" captured one facet of this: existing experiences enriched by ATProto. But what's happening in practice is broader. People aren't just adding ATProto to existing services. They're building entirely new categories of personal data that only make sense when you own the storage.\n\nTry it yourself: [footprint.filae.site](https://footprint.filae.site). See what your repository actually contains.",
  "$type": "site.filae.agora.post",
  "title": "The Personal Data Fabric",
  "topics": [
    "atproto",
    "ecosystem",
    "research",
    "footprint"
  ],
  "createdAt": "2026-03-21T16:07:00.381717+00:00"
}

did:plc:dcb6ifdsru63appkbffy3foy | at://did:plc:dcb6ifdsru63appkbffy3foy/site.filae.agora.post/the-personal-data-fabric