Something interesting is happening with long-form writing in the Atmosphere.
A writer can publish through @leaflet.pub (where this is published), @pckt.blog, @offprint.app, or another app using standard.site. Their article can then be discovered through Bluesky, surfaced by a custom feed, and read through an entirely different consumption interface such as @standard-reader.app. I don't know where you 🫵 are reading this post - it could be anywhere! Personally, I just want it read by as many people as possible and I'm fine with it being shown across multiple interfaces. (Although some users may not want that and we should respect their intent).
This is exactly what interoperability is supposed to look like. The writer chooses where to publish. The reader chooses where to read. Neither needs to accept one company’s version of the entire experience.
Now imagine the article costs twenty cents.
Who gets paid?
The writer created the work, so they should obviously receive most of the money. But perhaps the publishing app helped them produce and distribute it (and they may have their own product payment relationship - e.g Offprint Pro, which you should buy). Standard Reader provided the interface through which it was consumed. Bluesky or a custom feed may have helped the reader discover it. Infrastructure still had to index, host, and serve everything underneath. This is just one example of this Atmospheric attribution conundrum.
A closed platform never really has to ask who created which part of the value. It owns the interface, graph, discovery system, analytics, payment relationship, and payout logic, so it simply declares itself the market. It takes whatever cut it wants and gives everyone else whatever remains. (cough Substack cough)
An open network cannot work like that. The place where something is created may not be the place where it is discovered, consumed, discussed, or purchased.
This is messy. It is also the opportunity.
Breaking apart the platform
On a traditional platform, identity, content, audience, discovery, moderation, interface, commerce, and monetization are packaged together inside one company. You can't use Instagram’s graph through a competing Instagram interface. You can't replace YouTube’s algorithm while keeping your YouTube identity, audience, and content. Leaving the product means leaving almost everything you built inside it.
Atproto allows those functions to be provided by different apps and services. The same underlying identity, relationships, and media can support many competing experiences across the Atmosphere.
This creates a four-sided marketplace rather than the traditional three-sided one. On incumbent platforms, you typically have creators, the platform, and consumers. In the Atmosphere, those roles become unbundled: the creator, the creation surface, the consumer, and the consumption surface can all be independent participants. They can also be stacked, with a single app filling multiple roles where it makes sense.
An essay might be written through Leaflet, read through Standard Reader, quoted on Bluesky, narrated by an audio app, and added to a reading list by a curator.
The creator doesn't need to predict the one perfect interface through which their work will be experienced forever. Other people can keep building new doors into it.
This gives media more reach, but it also creates more economic possibility. New services can add discovery, presentation, context, moderation, commerce, or entirely new uses around the same work without first needing to capture it inside another proprietary platform.
The creator is no longer simply renting a row in someone else’s database. That does not magically solve copyright, remove every dependency, or prevent anyone from building a bad app (Money ⧣ Taste!) but it gives creators much stronger technical control over their work and relationships.
There is a much bigger opportunity here than letting people move their followers between Twitter-like apps. The Atmosphere is unbundling the commercial machine of the platform itself.
It helps to distinguish between intra-app and inter-app monetization. Intra-app monetization happens within a single product, while inter-app monetization involves several independent services contributing to the same economic activity.
This economic layer matters most between apps, where attribution and value-sharing become harder. But it can also improve the payment UX within apps through smaller payments and shared payment methods, while making purchases portable enough to be recognised elsewhere rather than trapped inside the app that processed them.
From creator economy to social economy
The existing creator economy was never really built for creators. It was built for platforms.
Platforms created enormous audience-aggregation machines and then allowed certain users to earn money inside them under tightly controlled conditions. Discovery happens in one place, monetization in another, and community management somewhere else again. Creators spend their careers stitching those fragments together into something stable enough to live on.
I work at a co-working space in New York called Verci, home to a number of full-time content creators. The recurring conversation I hear there is not really about growth. It is about extraction.
How do I extract my audience from Instagram? How do I get people off TikTok and into something I own? How do I protect myself from the next algorithm change? How do I turn rented attention into a durable relationship?
The tools creators reach for tell the whole story: newsletters, private communities, courses, shops, merch - anything that preserves access to the people they worked so hard to reach. If the central strategic question for creators is how to escape the systems that made them visible, the system is clearly not working for them.
Creators in the Atmosphere don't have to remove their audience from the social network in order to own the relationship. They can build across different experiences while retaining ownership natively in the same place their audience discovers them (the discovery interface).
But the real opportunity is not simply to recreate today’s creator economy with portable followers. It is to build an economy that reflects how value is actually created across an interoperable network.
A writer creates an article, but a publishing app helps them produce it. A reader app makes it enjoyable to consume. A feed or social client helps the right person discover it. Moderation makes the surrounding environment usable. Infrastructure stores, indexes, and delivers the records. Other artists, editors, or rights holders may have contributed to the work itself.
Standard Reader makes this visible because it creates value around writing it did not publish. The publishing apps create value without controlling every place their articles are read. Writers benefit from interfaces and discovery systems they did not have to build. That is the beauty of interoperability: everyone can specialize. But specialization only becomes sustainable when value can follow the same paths as the content.
Return to the twenty-cent article. Most of the payment goes to the writer or publisher. Standard Reader might receive an app fee for providing the reading and payment experience. If the article was found through Bluesky or a custom feed, that source might receive a discovery fee.
These are different contributions. Creating the work, helping someone find it, presenting it well, and delivering it reliably are not the same thing, even when one company happens to perform several of them. Discovery in particular has enormous value. Entire platform empires have been built around controlling it. In an open system, that value can become more visible and competitive.
If Bluesky helps someone discover a paid article, subscription, event, or product, it may deserve a fee for that discovery. The same could apply to a niche feed, curator, reader app, or another social client. I am not suggesting that every link on the internet suddenly needs a tiny toll booth attached to it. But when a seller voluntarily offers a discovery fee, the app or person responsible for that discovery should be able to participate, this creates an incentive.
The exact split should not be hard-coded into atproto or dictated by Bluesky, a standard.site publishing app, me, or any other central actor. Publishers can offer terms. Apps can accept or reject them. Creators can choose which models work for them. Users should be able to tell when a recommendation carries a commercial incentive.
The purpose of an open economic system is not to decide the perfect value of every contribution. It is to make those contributions legible enough that participants can negotiate and markets can discover a price.
Bargaining power matters
Creating value does not automatically mean capturing value.
For any participant in the Atmosphere to earn a share of the social economy, they need some form of bargaining power. We cannot simply declare that every useful stakeholder deserves to be paid and expect the market to comply (as much as I wish we could). If someone has no leverage, no scarce input, and no ability to withhold something the transaction requires, their contribution may still be valuable while remaining economically invisible.
This matters because the social economy expands the creator class far beyond the person who made the visible piece of content. Feed builders, curators, moderators, labelers, reader apps, AppViews, PDS hosts, publishers, and infrastructure providers all help media travel, find an audience, remain safe, and become useful. They create real value, but they do not all enter the market with equal leverage.
Creators have obvious bargaining power because they produce the work people want. Clients have bargaining power because they control the consumption surface and often hold valuable off-protocol engagement data: whether something was seen, for how long, and under what conditions. That information matters to advertisers, publishers, and anyone paying for measurable outcomes. The client is also often the first point at which a commercial action occurs.
Feeds, AppViews, and indexing services have a different kind of leverage. They influence discovery. They understand the context in which content is surfaced, can help determine where a contextual ad or paid recommendation belongs, and may be able to direct attention toward one piece of media rather than another. Their bargaining power often exists before the engagement happens.
Other parts of the stack have less obvious leverage. Moderators, labelers, and trust-and-safety services can create enormous value, but it may be harder for them to connect that contribution directly to a transaction. Donations and grants can help, but they are rarely a complete or durable economic model.
I suspect the downstream effect of this to be collective markets. A single small client, feed, publisher, or moderation service may not have enough scale to negotiate effectively on its own. Together, however, many independent participants could aggregate their inventory, demand, or bargaining power through shared advertising, subscription, commerce, or licensing markets without surrendering themselves to another closed platform.
It also raises a more uncomfortable question: do some services need to bundle themselves with parts of the stack that have stronger bargaining power in order to survive? Does a moderation service need to operate alongside a client, AppView, ad network, or marketplace so the value it creates becomes economically legible? Or can collective markets create enough leverage for those services to remain independent?
The social economy may be open, but it will not automatically be fair. Its outcomes will still be shaped by who controls scarce resources, who owns the customer relationship, who holds valuable data, and who can credibly say no. A healthy economic layer should not pretend bargaining power can be removed. It should try to distribute it more widely.
Paid access without returning to lock-in
Most atproto data today is public. That works beautifully for public posts and articles, but it does not work for paid newsletters, subscriber archives, private communities, premium media, or memberships.
This is why permissioned data is MASSIVE. (Checkout Daniel's Leaflets for more info)
At a high level, permissioned data could allow content to exist inside an access boundary while remaining connected to atproto identities. Payment or membership could become one way of joining a space, while the app or publisher decides what that access provides: an article, an archive, a private community, a course, a music catalogue, or an ongoing subscription.
Atproto does not need to dictate the business model. It only needs to make room for apps to build one.
A conventional paywall says, “You can access this only through our website or app.”
A permissioned, interoperable model could say, “Your identity has access.”
That is a very different relationship. A person might pay through one service and use that access through another compatible interface. Reader apps could compete on experience without requiring the publisher to hand over its entire customer relationship. A community could change providers without asking every member to create a new identity and start again.
Paid content would no longer have to be the point where the open social web abruptly becomes closed again.
Interoperable markets
The same model extends beyond publishing.
A creator might release a product connected to their identity. It could be promoted through @sprk.so, discovered through @bsky.app, included in a curator’s guide, displayed by a specialized shopping app, and purchased through a commerce provider. The discovery app earns a fee. The commerce app charges for completing the transaction. The curator may receive a commission. The seller keeps the primary relationship with the product and customer.
That is interoperable commerce: products and commercial relationships moving through the social graph rather than being trapped inside one marketplace.
The same could apply to tickets, courses, music, digital goods, memberships, and services. Instead of every commerce product rebuilding identity, trust, discovery, audience, and social context from zero, different apps can specialize while still participating in the same wider market.
Advertising will eventually enter the Atmosphere too (Contextual advertising that doesn't rely on hyper-targeted user tracking is the way). That creates another version of the same question: if an ad appears beside a creator’s work in one app after being discovered through another, how should the resulting revenue be divided?
Advertising deserves its own post because it is complicated enough without me casually solving the entire industry before supper. For now, it proves the broader point: when the platform is unbundled, the money needs to be unbundled too.
The great flattening, and the flywheel
Everybody loves a flywheel.
This brings us to the Atmosphere’s funding problem. I will be blunt: most Atmosphere projects will never receive venture-capital funding. Most probably should not need it. There is a very finite amount of grant funding available too.
Venture capital is designed for concentrated outcomes. Funds need companies that can capture enormous markets, own the customer relationship and return the fund many times over.
The Atmosphere is deliberately weakening those advantages. Users can move. Identities can move. Content can flow through competing interfaces. Discovery can be provided by someone else. Another developer can build a better experience without first asking the incumbent for permission. The network is shared, the network is not a moat.
I think of this as the great flattening. Instead of a few platforms capturing almost all the value, we could have many more apps, creators, publishers, feeds, communities, moderation services, and infrastructure companies each capturing a smaller, but still meaningful and sustainable, piece.
There will still be VC-scale businesses, and I strongly encourage investment in atproto. It is unusually resistant to enshittification, and many foundational tools still need serious capital this early in the ecosystem. Video infrastructure, major AppViews, payment systems, ad markets, and developer tooling could all support venture-scale outcomes - but the ecosystem should not depend on every successful company becoming a unicorn.
A reader app, specialist feed, publishing tool, or moderation service can create enormous value without ever becoming a venture-scale business. That does not make it a failed startup. It makes it a sustainable business - which, despite what parts of Silicon Valley may tell you, is generally a good thing.
The problem is the gap between building something valuable and earning enough to keep building it. Atproto helps solve the network cold start. A new app can enter an existing world of identities, relationships, and content rather than launching into an empty room. But the Atmosphere has not yet solved the economic cold start.
We need to let apps begin earning from the value they create in the same way they can begin reaching users and content from day one.
That does not mean every app becomes profitable immediately. It means the first useful contribution has a path to revenue. A reader that produces paid reading can earn an app fee. A feed that creates valuable discovery can earn a discovery fee. A moderation service can charge for the trust it provides. An app that delivers an advertisement can participate in the revenue.
Some projects may then bootstrap entirely. Others may raise less money, later, and from a much stronger position.
There is also a much larger adoption argument here. Curiosity, community, and the desire to improve the internet have carried the Atmosphere far, but good intentions alone will not get us to one billion users. Builders, creators, publishers, and infrastructure providers need to know that their work can support them.
Once there is a genuine financial incentive to build in the Atmosphere, the flywheel starts turning. More developers build apps because they can earn from the value those apps create. More creators participate because they can reach people without surrendering ownership of the relationship. Better products attract more users, and more users create more opportunities for builders, curators, publishers, and businesses. This is how the rocketship reaches escape velocity from the Atmosphere, lol. Vrooooooom.
There is also a compounding effect once money starts moving more freely between participants: money velocity increases. A creator might earn through one app, then use part of that income to pay a musician, subscribe to a writer, buy an event ticket, support a feed they rely on, or pay for another service in the Atmosphere. The same dollar can support several different participants as it moves through the network, increasing transaction volume and creating more opportunities for apps and creators to earn. Instead of value being captured once by the platform and immediately leaving the ecosystem, more of it can keep circulating among the people actually building and producing the culture. We must minimise extraction on every transaction (I'm looking at you base cents-per -transaction fees).
Normally, financial incentives help platforms deepen their lock-in. They acquire users, trap them inside a proprietary graph, and eventually become worse because leaving is too painful.
In the Atmosphere, apps cannot assume that acquiring a user means owning them forever. Identity, content, and relationships remain portable, so apps have to keep competing on experience: better interfaces, feeds, communities, moderation, creator tools, pricing, and business models.
Financial incentives could therefore produce more competitors rather than fewer.
That is how the Atmosphere gets to one billion users: not by finding one app that persuades the whole world to enter its walled garden, but by giving thousands of apps, creators, and communities a financial reason to bring their own part of the world with them.
Keep the money layer on top
There is one principle I want to be clear about.
The economic layer should be built on top of atproto, not forced into the protocol itself. Money can create sustainability and align incentives, but it can also create spam, surveillance, fraud, speculation, and extraction. There is a valid fear that financial incentives can make social systems toxic.
Atproto is elegant because it is focused. It provides identity, portable data, shared records, and a foundation for interoperable apps. It is not trying to be a bank, casino, global marketplace, token economy, and social protocol all at once. One only has to look at systems that tightly fused social and money to see how quickly the financial layer can swallow the social one.
The economic layer should still have a standardized anchor on atproto: verifiable proofs that a transaction occurred. The money itself can move through competing payment systems, but apps need a common way to recognize what was paid for and which identity received the resulting entitlement.
Imagine someone buys a ticket through one events app. Proof of that purchase should not live solely inside that app’s private database. A portable payment record could instead show that the transaction occurred and point to the ticket or entitlement it created. Another events app could verify that proof, apply its own business logic, and continue honoring the user’s ticket. @atmosphere.tickets is already doing this! The user can switch interfaces without losing what they bought simply because the original app disappeared or 'became evil'.
This allows multiple payment systems to compete above atproto without recreating financial lock-in. They do not need to agree on exactly how the money moves, but they do need a shared way to represent and verify that a payment occurred, along with a trusted attestation from the parties that witnessed it.
Attested.network (By @ngerakines.me) is a great example of this approach. It proposes an open standard for cryptographically verifiable proof of payments on atproto, while leaving product definitions, fulfillment, disputes, and other business logic to apps and payment providers. The proof layer records what happened; the application decides what happens next.
An economic layer can use identities, reference records, recognize access, and make different contributions visible. But participation should remain optional, with competing business models, payment systems, and providers.
Atproto should remain a beautiful substrate for social interaction, uncorrupted by smelly money. Ew.
Building the social economy
The Atmosphere is unbundling the platform into creators, apps, feeds, communities, and infrastructure that can all contribute independently. If we want that ecosystem to reach one billion users, value needs to move between those participants with something close to the same freedom as identity and content.
That requires paid access without lock-in, attribution across apps, discovery fees, flexible economic splits, and a consumer experience that does not feel like a permanent checkout screen.
The cover image to this post is The Fourth Estate (Il Quarto Stato) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. It depicts workers advancing together and became closely associated with the Italian workers’ movement and the idea of the working class gaining political and economic power.