Making it stupidly easy to get your own PDS

I somehow miss the days when our biggest worry was whether the X-Pro II or Toaster would make our pizzas and burgers look tastier. Looking back at my old photos, I really wonder what emotional trauma I was trying to mask with that heavy X-Pro II vignette. it was the (at least for me) golden age of mobile photography. Blurry concert stages and dramatic sunsets had to be AGGRESSIVELY desaturated and heavily bordered before approving them to be worthy of being shown in my friend's Instagram feed.

Back then my only digital crisis was choosing between the pretty Valencia and the burnt edges of Toaster (lol). Treating the internet as an open playground or personal notebook in which we were throwing content and being curious if and how many people would double tap it. We uploaded our lives chronologically and without strategy.

In that era the layer beneath the nice feeds, where you just refreshed just to see which of your friends posted something new, I didn't care where my data was physically hosted. I didn't know what a data center looked like nor did I care which jurisdiction governed these servers humming in there. When presented with a 50 page with terms of service, I just scrolled to the bottom and hit "I agree" immediately, reckless and somehow confident that someone has thought it through and it certainly won't be to my disadvantage. cough. Or at least I thought I had nothing to lose with silly images of burgers and my self-timed "walking-at-the-beach-into-the-distance"-images I had shot with my first digicam on an old tripod.

What the fuck do you mean with intellectual property and how the hell would data mining be of use with my kind of content? I just wanted to publish things, to share, to connect and to exist online without overthinking everything.

Fast forward 14 years: the landscape has completely flipped. My carefree social place turned into a highly monetized, heavily monitored corporate battleground.

We just transitioned from being individuals who use free tools to becoming the actual producct being bought, sold and ultimately fed into AI (automated incompetence) models no one has asked for. The platforms we once trusted – it's hard so say, I never thought I'd ever feel the need to TRUST someone or thing with my memories – have now turned into profit seekers praying for more content of our digital identities.

Suddenly we are facing all the questions we had not to worry about in the beginning. Who actually owns your data? Who owns the words you write and the images you capture? What happens to my digital self if a platform changes its algorithm over night, blocks my account or goes bankrupt? (although this one is very unlikely to happen) Where is my data stored? And under what country's surveillance laws does it fall?

Knowing the answer to these questions has shifted from a niche tech concern to one the most critical issues of our digital lives. We can no longer just publish things and hope for the best, the era of digital naivety is dead. Sadly no vintage filtering can mask this reality, this mess of a social data world we now live in.

So we have somehow found ourselves stuck in a frustrating dilemma. Either we capitulate and hand total control of our digital lives to Silicon Valley or we spend our weekends setting up our own linux servers writing configs for your own home-cloud. Nice. But not everybody should have to do that. No one should be forced to get a computer science degree just to protect their privavy.

And there is no need for a 100% selfhosted home-made cloud infrastructure in your bedroom (although it would probably turn out pretty sick). Maybe you just want to upload bloody pictures of pizzas, slap a filter on them and share your life with your mates not having to know what a damn Raspberry Pi is.

ATProto enters the chat.

The beauty of this decentralized architecture lies in data sovereignty. Selfhosting is brilliant. But only viable if you actually know how to do it. Like said, it should not be a privilege reserved exclusively for tech people. Everybody deserves the peace of mind that comes with knowing their data belongs to them. This should be the baseline standard, not an engineering challenge.

Because we were utterly fed up with this barrier to entry, we decided to build a way out (and into atproto). We created one-click Personal Data Servers (in short: PDS, your personal digital "backpack").

As part of the Atmosphere (AT Protocol ecosystem), your posts, photos, and friends don't belong to the app. They belong to you. Think of it like your phone number: if you get tired of your phone provider, you can switch to a new one and keep your exact same number and contacts. Like this, you can change apps without losing your digital life.

Our motivation: eliminate the technical gatekeeping and make the decentralized web more accessible to absolutely everyone. In fact, we are integrating our one-click PDS service deeply into our upcoming app eny.social so that users can spin up their own dedicated PDS with a single button click directly in the onboarding flow. No external accounts to create, nothing else technical to manage. Just a private slice of the web that actually belongs to you. For the next generation of the web.

Unfortunately we got used to expecting free apps and platforms. We paid the big tech platforms with our privacy. We don't do that. Our managed hosting is not free because we run an honest and transparent infrastructure. You pay for your server space and in return your data belongs to 100% you. It's as simple as that.

We are trying to bring back the effortless joy of 2012 but equipping it with the data independence we desperately need in 2026.

Golden hour over the Main in Frankfurt, 2018. Filter very much included haha.