POSSE and AT Protocol can be understood as interoperable marketplaces. Platforms like Reddit and Instagram already function this way: the product is user content, the payment is attention, and the platform’s cut is ads or behavioral data. Dan argues that this structure is not inevitable. If social data is treated as something people own and store themselves, applications stop being the owners of social graphs and become interfaces that read from user-controlled data instead.

I am working on a similar model for commerce. Sellers deploy their own commerce logic such as orders, carts, and payments as a hosted service they control, and marketplaces integrate directly with seller APIs rather than hosting sellers. This removes platform overhead, lowers fees, and shifts ownership back to the people creating value, turning marketplaces into interoperable discovery layers instead of gatekeepers.