The Case For Universal Login and "Off-Protocol" Services

We’re not arguing against that. People are obviously still free to register for a separate account. If they already have a Bluesky account they can still just sign-up directly to Roomy to create a new account and vise-versa.

But I, personally, am way more likely to use the plethora of ATProto apps lying around exactly because I don’t have to sign up and create a new account for each of them.

We don’t need to do that, we can just say, “put in your Atmosphere handle” and figure out which account you have for that handle right there.

And even the need to enter your handle is possibly going away with FedCM, which is a browser feature that allows you to select a preferred login provider so you can just click one button to login and it can figure out your handle / auth provider.


Also, if you have separate accounts for everything, that means you have separate ATProto repos. You don’t have all your personal data in one place, and you can’t easily migrate your data for all your apps to different hosting because you’d have to migrate multiple accounts.

Being able to log into Margin and have their Semble cards picked up has been something that people have really enjoyed, and that’s not possible if I create a separate account for everything.

Modifying events that I created in atmo.rsvp in smokesignals is another situation. And smokesignals provides more controls around event creation than atmo.rsvp, so there are useful things about having multiple apps able to access my same data.

Having an “everything” account isn’t about being forced to use one account for everything. It’s about being able to choose to use one account, and bring your data with you wherever you go.

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Every word, every element every pixel on your frontend is there because you decided to have it there.

Everything can be a point of churn.

I want Roomy to win. For that you need your ux to be as simple as Discord (or even simpler). Its not there yet. I tried to challenge you in seeing this.

I agree, there is a lot of value in having lots of different lexicon data be in one did. But if that comes at the cost of “internet handle”, its not going to win.

I blogged about this here: fuck marry kill: usernames, email, and internet handle - hot takes