Hello everyone, I am the sole developer of offprint.app (@offprint.app).
We’re still in early development, but we’ve identified several compelling use cases where private data could significantly improve publishing platforms like ours and Leaflet. Here’s what we’re thinking:
Unpublished/draft articles:
Currently, we plan to store drafts in our database since there’s no good alternative. Private data would be perfect here. We could store not only saved articles but also complete edit histories, allowing writers to track their creative process and revert changes seamlessly.
Pay-walled/subscriber-only content:
This is complex. We’re exploring encryption-based solutions, but key management and rotation is challenging. Private data could elegantly solve this by allowing us to serve premium content directly from authenticated users’ repos, with the protocol handling access control.
Subscriber data and preferences:
Beyond just email lists, we’re talking about complete subscriber relationships (emails, subscription tiers, reading preferences, and engagement data). This would enable true platform portability: a creator could move from Substack to Offprint to any other AT Protocol publishing platform while maintaining their entire subscriber base and relationship history.
Analytics and engagement data:
Reader behavior, open rates, click-through data, and performance metrics. Currently siloed in each platform, but could be portable and creator-owned.
Editorial workflows:
For publications with multiple writers: assignment tracking, editorial notes, approval workflows, and collaboration history between authors and editors.
These use cases all point to the same thing: creators deserve to own not just their content, but their entire publishing business (relationships, data, and revenue streams included).
Without private data, we’re all stuck with the old model.
If private data isn’t implemented, platforms like ours will need to host all this information in our own databases. I hope we can find a community-based solution for this or demonstrate that it’s a worthwhile investment for the AT Protocol team.