LightNews LightNews
artmllr.bsky.social
@artmllr.bsky.social
0 followers 12 following 0 posts
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted
danabra.mov
interesting discussion subbranch on HN about whether AT is a dead end because client fragmentation makes products uncompetitive. my thoughts:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4666...
All good points. Maybe I’m optimistic for no good reason. I feel there’s something slightly different at play here but I struggle to put my finger on it. Overall I agree with the take that a client for somebody else’s product is usually degraded experience. You want to deploy features vertically, and even existence of worse clients is a threat to that. I think one exception to that is when the main client is intentionally worse for the sake of other goals. Eg lots of ads. Or just the company being (or becoming) incompetent at making a client. Then alternative clients inject some new life and competition into the product. But if the product owner is good at making clients, they probably don’t benefit from fragmentation. And still it feels somehow different to me. I think a part of it is that the space itself is vastly expanded in AT. We’re not just talking about a vertical app with a few offshoot clients that do the same thing but poorly. I mean, that still exists, but the proposition is that things can reach way beyond the original product. Products can blend. When products blend, there’s always this inherent coordination problem. Those who make multiple vertical products have to deal with similar things. At some point you have to stagger rollouts, support features partially or in a limited way, or show a simple version and direct to main app for more. Think Threads “bleeding through” Instagram, different kinds of cross-posting that they experiment with between apps. This is valuable but normally only monopolies can build meaningful cross-product bleeding because otherwise you have to negotiate API agreements and it’s just too risky to build on someone else’s turf. What AT changes is that every product can cross-bleed into every other product. My teal.fm plays show up on my Blento page. So yes, you do have this fragmentation, but you also get something in return. It’s not fragmentation between the main way to show a thing and a couple offshoots, but between a web of products. And there is always a canonical schema so it doesn’t descend into chaos. I think there’s a “there” there. I actually agree the key pillar is identity. It’s what AT URIs start with identity first. I think one way to look at AT is that the “contact list” analogy is right, but now that we’ve chosen the identity layer, we might as well put all our data into the contact list.
January 20, 2026 at 12:09 PM