Taking back My Data

Been thinking about some of the walled off services, applications, and platforms I use where I enter or post information. I realized that while they provide the structure of the data, they only own my inputs/data because I leave it on their systems.

Take Letterboxd for example. I love using Letterboxd to track movies I want to see, then reviewing the movies after I watch them as my own personal diary. The information I submit is still my data, right? My opinions, my timestamps, my reviews, etc. All that data resides within the Letterboxd walled garden, but the personalize data, my data, is free to leave. Letterboxd makes it easy to export that data, its just formatted for Letterboxd use.

I have decided to take that data and reformat it the way I want. I will export it from Letterboxd, then define the data using cool things like schemas, lexicons, and collections so that I store that data in my repository to be used elsewhere.

This is what ATProto is all about. It is not platforms, applications, etc. It is the data. My data. I'll use it how I want, then feed it to other applications.