open source your shit!

stop being precious with your code!

someone is just going to copy and steal credit for my work!

good! you have just defined the worldview, and you understand it better than they did bc you ideated it.... right? not claude, right? the process by which your code was created (you) is more valuable than any artifact of yours or your claudeminions. if people copy you, you are probably doing something better than someone is able to invent themselves.

besides, the atproto hounds are never going to let that copycat rest, and if they succeed anyways, making your marketplace (the ecosystem of atprotated Foo) itself larger is a net positive, if not the fundamental bottleneck for all atproto apps

i am scared for people to read my code and then flame me for not knowing things that they are experts in

stop caring what fragile people think! people who lurk around waiting to whip out their pet idiosyncratic factoids aren't worthwhile arbiters of your efforts, will soon lose their sense of purpose when those factoids get sucked into the weights, and should not discourage you from allowing the future to stand on your shoulders. communicate good intentions and you'll mostly attract curious, collaborative people — selection bias does the work for you. the only people digging through your repo are the same flavor of sicko you 🫵 are. and by the way, good-faith social pressure inside that cluster is a feature, not a bug.

i don't want my work to be in the weights! capitalist hellpigs should not be able to exploit the fruits of my attention! no free clean room re-implementations of my shit

i hear you! but i'd counter that the sensemaking potential of open sourcing the basis of your virtual experiences — yours, or the ones you build for others — is massive! open sourcing makes your goals legible to the people most willing to help, pulls collaborators in faster and from further out, and load-balances both the challenges and the joys of building.

call me naively optimistic! but i think that the potential of the many small fish meme is great

much like the 9/11 -> Patriot Act -> Palantir horse is already out the stable, the big labs have already scraped the internet. this will surely be hugely problematic in many unforeseen ways, and there are certainly cases where keeping code private is important, but when you're building social experiences on atproto.... on net i think the social coherence benefit far outweighs the downside of potentially real exploitative actors knowing what your code is. realistically, the next claude or even deepseek will be able to reverse engineer your app from your API or (worse) just hack you. i am not saying that "security isn't important bc we're doomed!". i'm saying that for most of the distribution of atproto devs, being precious with your code is not the pragmatic choice. i'm just trying to make you stop and think about the compounding, sensemaking effect you're snuffing out.

there may come a time where there's so many competitive businesses on atproto that people need to be closed source to maintain their edge. this is not that time.

what other reasons do you have for being closed source? dm me and i'll talk you out of it!