Habitat: a data home for organizations

Since the conference, Habitat has been undergoing some changes! We wanted to share an update with the broader community about some of these, since we've gone a bit radio silent since the conference (an ATmosphereConf recap post is still sitting in my drafts 🙃).

Our guiding thesis has always been that the internet could be less exploitative and predatory, but also more usable and powerful, if data ownership was built into the internet at an infrastructural layer. The work around cliques, private data, and local-first that we pursued earlier this year was very much around a dream we had of "(all) your data in a box". To realize that dream, we believe there needs to be additional infrastructure that allows your data to be directly shared with other people's "boxes" without relying on third-parties and aggregation servers (AppViews in the system today), and more so that this must be done in a scalable, usable way.

However, as we began working on this problem space of data ownership with people actively interested in using Habitat to own their data, a more glaring gap we found for immediate use-cases was the lack of data ownership at the group / community / organization level.

Tell me more

The words group / community / organization mean different things to different people and have been used in so many contexts that at this point they could mean almost anything. Since there is some discussion already about this on Discourse and in many other threads, let me clarify specifically what Habitat is trying to achieve and solve for:

If none of that made sense, then a more concrete way of thinking about Habitat is that it is a backing data store for everything that is typically silo-ed into SaaS providers when working at a company, and then letting you do more with it.

"Doesn't [permissioned spaces | delegated accounts | x] solve this?"

Yes and no. We are excited about a lot of the work happening in the ecosystem and hope to collaborate and contribute to it, but in pulling together all the constrains laid out above, we've made choices in some cases to reuse and some cases to depart from the active work happening. We will dive deeper into some of the technical decisions we've been making here through ... future posts!

Call for collaboration

Finally, we believe being "on protocol" to use atprotospeak is a major benefit and advantage to Habitat. Previous attempts at doing something like this seem to have gone one of two ways:

With that being said, if any of this sounds interesting, relevant, or useful, please reach out to us! We are actively looking for more design partners (both teams building for the organizational use-case within AT protocol and teams who would like Habitat for themselves internally) and collaborators.

The team

The last piece of personally very exciting news is that it is not just me (@offline.arushibandi.com) working on Habitat full-time!!! (Many !s of excitement about this)! Sashank Gogula (even more offline than me @sashankg.bsky.social) left his previous full-time job at Glean no more than 9 days ago to become Habitat's CTO and Co-founder with myself.

With that rare SF sunshine & see you all at ATproto Bay Area meetup tomorrow,

-Arushi ☀️