by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-08 17:46:06+00:00
I agree that the sprawl of objective, trying to cover more and more, is quasi horrific in the ways we have seen it: seen through market captures and monopolization and acquisitions of Instagram, etc.

But for computing, not having a network fabric that is adaptable to purpose has kept people from having any starting point to play with. Every time you want to build a social system, you start with your own website, with your own bespoke back end, your own unique internal and or external API, rather than having set protocols you can adapt.

This isn't strictly true. There have been many attempts to build more good protocols, with endurance and reuse and adaptability. RemoteStorage, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, HyperCore/Swarm, or Dat (which atproto cto @pfrazee built a browser for, Beaker). This is not the place for writing a Speaking for the Dead for each of these, (and none of them are dead beyond grasp), but so far this question of what gets the most use, what has seen the most apps built upon it, the most end user adoption: it has a clear answer and it's atproto.

Atproto layers social networking right. You are self sovereign to a data store that you control, that has your records in it (https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/). It makes syndication cheap & easy. It makes relays that aggregated PDS's while presenting a like API surface to the individual user, to facilitate syndication en masse. It layers indexers (appviews) that provide aggregation etc. This mirrors a functional social network system, goes beyond protocols to be a complete system, that is imminently individually maintainable, at scale.

It provides a platform that anyone can use to be creative, in a connected fashion. Your phrasing hints at the whiff of terror that these large companies have, the reign they have over our lives. The drive they have is to saturate, to take our attention. I see the role of atproto & it's drive as a network technology layer to allow new social technology layers to be created at very low cost. It allows individuals to build amazing services, very lightweight and client only / isolated web apps that speak the protocols and which can put or retrieve records or appviews, for any kind of social network technology.

That to me lacks the scariness you speak of. There is not one overarching drive or ambition. It is not centralized or directed intent, working cohesively to capture society.

@pfrazee distilled it well in Atmospheric Computing, a lovely post. That to me resonated strongly everywhere but especially the cold start problem. That it used to be hard for people to make connected things. And now it's not. That's the essence of the cold start problem. And rather than control the things we create, the role of the creator is different: they facilitate creating records, tools to help people build Abramov's Social Filesystem (previous link). They don't nor should they want to own the network, the protocols, the data, the users, the accounts. Those are atmospheric ambient systems that exist.

> It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit

I perceived a noted lack of techno-social substrait upon which individuals or entities could collaboratively build or explore. The systems humanity has built have been dead end systems, built for narrow set purposes. There has been a missing General Systems Research component to computing for decades. There has never been a successful General Network Research effort, beyond the web itself (what a hit), and the vision TBL had for the web as a bidirectional writable author able medium never materialized. BlueSky corporation has me at least convinced that nothing can stop credible exit, that this is not their network, and independent actors like BlackSky have somewhat proven that out already in astoundly sophisticated end to end fashion, with incredible thought to their own moderation systems etc.