Unbundling Clients

RSS client, email client, mastodon client, AT Proto app, EVM wallet. 2023 seems to have been a big year for protocols. Since then, at least in my corner of the internet, the push has only gotten stronger. No one wants to put their identity, relationships, or business in the hands of some enclosed platform with arbitrary rules and draconic guidelines. No. We will own our data. And we will be happy.

Anyone who found this little (not)blog surfing the web will be nodding along now. Yes, this is the way. I think we can do better. Don’t get me wrong, I love protocols, and data sovereignty, and open interop as much as the next niche nerd but my product designer brain still thinks this is a terrible way to build applications. Designer’s have this saying often used (dismissively) to describe engineering led projects, “Technology in search of a solution.” The R&D team has made a motion sensor that can detect individual fingers? What if we did gestures controls in a car? “Technology in search of a solution”. . In the best of cases this approach can only ask, “who will want what I have already made?” but almost never “what do people want that I can make?”

Ecosystem is moving Protocols, while different from platforms in terms of power and control, often have the same pitfalls when it comes to deviation from the spec. What even is a protocol, if not a list of specifications.

Apps for people, protocols for machines.

To say I will build an app and it will be the best RSS Reader ever already starts with a ceiling on the best thing you can make. what happens to the problems inherent to the RSS spec. Will you follow the og version, rss 2 or atom? Interesting and how about podcasts? with ratings? Discovery and recommendations? The ecosystem moves too fast to tie an entire interface so closely to a single protocol. I wrote a bit about social unbundling back then, this a bit of a continuation from there.

  • https://fika.bar which combines rss, bookmarking and blogging.
  • Logseq will help you write notes, whether they are plain markdown or an extension of
  • Consider Apple Music and Spotify who’ve been growing over the years from taking control of your entire music library, to the place podcasts still ask you to write a review.
  • Autonomy Wallet (now not even a wallet) tailor-made for the purpose of interacting with digital art. Digital art. Not NFTs, OBJKTs, Ethereum, or DeFi. One of the more recent updates fully moves the responsibility of key management to a separate application.

It’s not all roses and sunshine