PDS as PKMS substrate

With a PDS, you have something that's better than a trad filesystem: standardized, built for programmatic interaction, built for networking, handles text and blobs, can be arbitrarily extended, extensions are discoverable .

The basic mode of interaction being filtering on the firehose is also key, since you decouple the front end from the backend; you can keep as much data on your PDS as you like, run all the lexicons you want, and you don't have to compromise or bow to a single overarching idea of what an atom is. For example, my bits and bobs can be put into three basic categories: xeets (short, untitled (title would be redundant since they're already heavily compressed)), articles (stories, essays, lists), and images (I don't rip a lot of audio or video, but I screenshot and save); due to inflexibility, I use a different application for each, which don't necessarily store data in a common place or have high-bandwidth comms channels. However, on atproto, I can embed xeets (bisks) directly in an article:

and articles directly in xeets:

Both of these modes can pull in images easily, as well. Perf is a consideration for self-hosting (I don't self-host so I don't know what's necessary), as is hosting costs, domain acquisition, etc (although if you're a skinflint bastard you can probably wangle a way to do it with free offerings from cloud providers), but really there's only one issue: private data. Because some stuff isn't meant for public consumption.

Coming Real Soon Now™