My cold explainer to an ex-NFL player about the Atmosphere

My hobbies include rooting for the New York Giants, talking about the Atmosphere and sending people LinkedIn connections. That’s how I ended up connected with an ex-NYG running back from the late 2010s.

He posted on LinkedIn that he was interested in hearing about new technologies and investments opportunities, and that his DMs were open. I sent him the following:

Hey! You mentioned your DMs being open and your interest in technology. I’m not sure if this is an investment opportunity, but I wanted to share with you my interested and excitement in Bluesky and the ATProtocol (the foundational platform architecture of Bluesky, and a whole lot more apps).

Right now, when we post in LinkedIn, Instagram, etc, all our data lives on and is owned by said platform. This allows the platforms to become massive walled gardens, making money off of our data. Last time I checked, no one loves these platforms, but it’s where our networks live, so we’re stuck.

With the ATProtocol, the data remains owned by the users themselves. The protocol brings true free market economics to the internet. If a platform becomes unliked, a competitor can emerge and everyone can bring their data to the new platform without having to even think about it.

Re: investment opportunities, idk yet where the opportunity is. In traditional tech investing, the idea is to find a company that will 1000x your investment. With the ATProtocol, since the data is portable, that 1000x opportunity might be impossible. That said, I foresee opportunity for thousands of small to medium businesses being able to compete and succeed.

There are a lot of brilliant people building apps and infrastructure on the protocol right now. If this interests you, I recommend reading https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ and checking out https://atstore.fyi/