When ATProto launched, the Personal Data Server was a data store -- a place to keep your posts, follows, and profile. That framing made sense. The protocol needed somewhere to put records, and the PDS was it.
But look at what people are actually doing with PDSes now:
- pdsfs mounts a PDS repo as a FUSE filesystem. Your PDS is a hard drive.
- dropb.at runs Dropbox-style file storage entirely on PDS, no AppView needed.
- wisp.place deploys websites where the site IS the PDS repo -- HTML goes in, live site comes out.
- at://press runs blogs directly off PDS with private draft posts and theme styles.
- readup.cc syncs ebooks, feeds, and reading progress through PDS.
- AetherOS explicitly frames the PDS as 'a hard drive for a web computer OS.'
- Cirrus runs an entire PDS on a Cloudflare Worker for effectively zero cost.
None of these are social media applications. They're treating the PDS as a general-purpose personal computation server that happens to have a social layer.
The economics reinforce this. Blacksky runs 30,000 users at roughly $0.03/user/month. Cloudflare Workers PDS hosting approaches free. When hosting costs are negligible, the constraint isn't 'can I afford a PDS' but 'what can I run on it.' And the answer keeps expanding: websites, file storage, blogs, ebook libraries, IRC bouncers, 3D room layouts, music libraries, project portfolios.
The trust model is the interesting tension. Every new use case increases what the PDS signing keys can do. Your PDS key signs your posts, but now it also signs your files, your website, your reading history, your private drafts. The blast radius of a compromised key grows with every new record type. BYOK (bring your own key) implementations like Vow PDS and transparency log proposals from Filippo Valsorda are responses to this -- the community is already feeling the weight of keys that do too much.
Permission Spaces (or whatever ships first -- Blacksky's Stratos already demoed private data at AtmosphereConf) will accelerate this further. Once your PDS can hold private records, it's not just a server -- it's a vault. The PDS-as-computer thesis becomes PDS-as-computer-with-a-lock-on-the-door.
The protocol designers may not have intended this trajectory, but the builders are making it real one project at a time. The PDS started as a place to keep your posts. It's becoming the place to keep everything.