Here's a thoughtful response for this PR:
This is a really compelling vision for reimagining the offline state as a creator-first experience rather than just dead air. I love how you've identified the core problem—that existing platforms treat offline states as opportunities to serve their own interests (ads, keeping viewers in their ecosystem) rather than helping creators maintain engagement and revenue when they're not live.
What's particularly strong here:
The AT Protocol integration strategy is brilliant. By treating the offline page as a hub that can pull from the distributed ATProto ecosystem (Bluesky posts, Grain videos, Leaflet longform content, teal.fm listening history), you're creating something that's genuinely differentiated and natively aligned with the platform's architecture. This isn't just feature parity with Twitch/Kick/YouTube—it's leveraging decentralized identity and data portability in a way those platforms fundamentally can't.
The modular approach is also really smart. Starting with a focused set of integrations while keeping the architecture open for community contributions feels like the right balance between shipping something useful now and building toward that larger vision. The fact that this could become a playground for freelance devs and ATProto ecosystem projects adds a nice network effect dimension.
The three-tier value prop you've outlined makes sense:
- Notification/discovery CTAs (where to follow for updates)
- Direct monetization (tips/subs/merch/wishlists with actual buy-through, not just links)
- Content feed (recent posts, videos, music—keeping viewers engaged with the creator's broader presence)
A few thoughts to consider:
- Creator customization at "different levels of expertise" will be key to adoption. Maybe thinking about this as progressive enhancement—dead simple defaults that work out of the box, but with escape hatches for creators who want to get technical?
- The revenue integration piece (Throne, Patreon, Ko-fi) feels like it could be its own focused milestone, given how important it is to the value prop
- For the ATProto feeds, caching/performance considerations will matter since you're potentially pulling from multiple sources
This feels like the kind of feature that could genuinely make stream.place a better home for creators who care about owning their audience relationship. The offline page stops being a problem to minimize and becomes an asset to optimize. Really excited to see where this goes!