"# 1. The Social Web As It Stands: What Now?
The social internet is a mess.
This shouldn’t be a surprising statement to anyone who spends time online. It’s not really a sentiment that’s specific to any particular social media platform either. It doesn’t matter if it’s YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Spotify, or any other platform out there. Of course, each of these platforms have their own unique issues, all caused by their own unique set of factors,. However, the consensus is clear: things here are just kind of *bad*.
To be clear, this sentiment is not new. In fact, it has been around for quite some time now, probably for around more than a decade. However, in the last year or two, things have felt a lot more *dire*, complaints often paired with a sense of urgency or despair. This is especially the case if you’ve interacted with creatives, whose entire livelihoods depend on the social internet — artists, musicians, YouTubers, journalists. People like my partner and my closest friends. Today, it feels like the *entire* online creative industry is on the edge of a precipice.
At the same time, the companies that own these platforms are going through some interesting times. The federal government has been quite trigger-happy in investigating and filing antitrust charges against the biggest tech companies. Apple, Amazon, and Meta are all in the iron sights of the Justice Department. Google, arguably *the* most powerful tech company in the world, has just been declared a monopoly by a federal judge, with its future uncertain. It certainly *feels* like we’re in an inflection point with our relationship with big tech.
But none of these events have been as loud, annoying, and horrific to watch as Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, one of the largest social media platforms in the world, and the one I was personally the most privy to.
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Twitter was already in a bad state before Musk’s takeover, struggling to turn a profit while dealing with rampant misinformation and far-right hate being spewed and amplified across the platform by its algorithm. However, Elon’s takeover kicked these issues to overdrive. In his time as Twitter’s owner, he has driven away nearly all reputable advertisers from the platform, amplified far-right hate accounts, created a pay-to-win algorithm filled to the brim with bots, and has made the platform an all-around unpleasant place to be in.
This... sucked! It was an awful experience seeing the platform where I met so many of my friends, where I met my partner, transformed, in real time, to an unrecognizable cesspool which I wanted no part of. It felt like a huge part of my online presence — a huge part of my online *identity* — was forcefully ripped away from me.
There was a time, in the beginning of Elon’s takeover, where there was a genuine feeling that the platform could collapse at any minute — that an entire pillar of the social internet could be simply wiped off the map. This prospect… was *horrifying*. Years and years of tweets, years and years of social connections, simply gone in an instant? Simply because some butthurt billionaire decided to buy himself a new toy?
I, like many others, panicked and looked for *any* halfway competent platform that could fill the void it would leave. Of course, since I wanted to keep my connections with my friends, I followed the crowd — and the crowd settled (at least at first) on Mastodon.
Mastodon was my first ever experience with decentralized social networking, as it was for many others. Myself, being the nerd that I am, researched more about this new and strange platform. In-between all the technical details of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon, it clicked for me, for the first time, the *vision*: a web where the users, not platforms, were in control, where no one company controlled the social internet, a web where what happened with Twitter — and what has been happening to the social web at large — could *never* ***ever*** happen again.
This concept of a decentralized social web stuck with me - even if Mastodon didn’t. I will talk more about the reasons why I left Mastodon later, but in short: it simply didn’t *click* with what I, as a young extremely-online twenty-something, expected from the social web. To put it bluntly, Mastodon felt more like being part of a network of *somewhat* interoperable old-school forums than a social media platform. This is not an inherently bad thing. It is simply not what I, or most other people like me, want out of social media.
Although I had the privilege of being able to hop onto a new social media site without worrying about my livelihood, the same cannot be said about my partner (**[@halcyandaze.art](https://bsky.app/profile/halcyandaze.art)**) and many of my friends, whose entire *livelihoods* depended on platforms like Twitter (or, if they were unlucky, just Twitter itself). For them, the calculus was very simple: either Twitter lives, and they’re forced to do business in an alt-right hellhole: or Twitter dies, and they’re fucked.
It should go without saying that this was, and still is, a *bad* position to be in. Let me reiterate: **the online presence and connections of millions of people, alongside the livelihoods of countless online creatives, hang on the balance of the frivolous decisions of an alt-right billionaire man-baby.** This is what the curent state of the social web, as it stands, has wrought us.
So... what now?
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Sometime in early-mid 2023, a new contender in the Twitter wars burst unexpectedly through the doors — Bluesky. A descendant of a little-known Twitter project meant to decentralize the platform, it had somehow spun off into its own independent "public benefit company", and had managed to make a functional platform a little over a year after Elon's takeover.
When I first learned about Bluesky, I had one predominant thought in my head: "This is *weird*".
Bluesky Social (the company behind Bluesky) said their original goal of building a decentralized social media platform hadn't changed. Yet they weren't using ActivityPub, the de facto protocol for decentralized social networking. Instead, they were creating their *own*, *entirely separate protocol*, built from the ground up.
This fact immediately made me suspicious: after all, why would they want to make an *entirely new protocol* instead of improving the already existing, well-established standard for decentralized social media? My immediate, cynical assumption, driven in no small part by Bluesky's (partial) for-profit status, was that this "decentralized protocol" they were building was a farce, a ploy to onboard desperate, hopeful Twitter refugees to pull the rug out from under them and lock them into their ecosystem yet again.
Despite this, many of the people I followed had a strong interest in the platform. Perhaps it was because the invite system made them feel like they were part of an exclusive club. Perhaps it was because they truly saw something special in the platform. Perhaps it was a bit of both. But I was not immune to the propaganda, and I, like many others, hunted for that oh-so-coveted invite code.
Interest in Bluesky came in waves. I was not successful in getting a code during the first few waves of interest — but I had the good sense that I would have an easier time finding one if I waited for the expected lull in interest.
That is exactly what I did. I managed to snag an invite from a rando on Twitter simply by liking a few of his posts. And on June 12th, 2023, I became one of the first 100,000 people to register for Bluesky.
I've been active on Bluesky consistently for over a year now, integrating myself into its communities and learning what makes it tick. After getting to know Bluesky's developers and the passionate groups of people invested in this project, seeing Bluesky's ecosystem grow up and thrive, coming to terms with what this platform and protocol *is* and what it's aiming to do, I can now confidently say this: *I have never been more hopeful for the future of the social web.*
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This is the first part of a multi-part blog post that will explain what makes me so excited about the **AT Protocol** (or ATproto), the protocol behind Bluesky. in a way that will hopefully be accessible to even the most tech-illiterate people. My hope is that someone like me, who is *not *a programmer and who knows firsthand how important the social web can be, can convey certain concepts and aspects of the protocol are difficult to grasp in a way that can connect with you, the person reading this.
What I'm sharing with you now is the result of months of blog posts, skeets, and conversations with people far more knowledgeable than I am, who have gracefully taken the time to explain all the features and quirks of the protocol to a curious rando like me. Without them, none of what you are reading here would have been possible. The ATproto developer community has been, by far, the kindest and most vibrant developer community I have ever come across, and I hope to return them the favor for all of those patient explanations through this blog post, sharing all that they have so kindly explained to me and explaining why *you* should be excited for what they're cooking up.
I would like to clarify, first and foremost, that ***I am not affiliated with Bluesky Social in any way, shape, or form***. Although I've gotten to know and chat with many of Bluesky Social's dev team, I myself have no relationship or conflicts of interest with the corporate entity. Everything that I write here and share with you is completely in earnest: I am writing this because I genuinely believe in the promise that ATproto holds for creating a truly social web, and I believe that the protocol's dev team has what it takes to pull it off.
I will split up this blog post into different sections, each building on the last, to understand what has gone wrong in the social web, where and how decentralized platforms succeeded and failed at fixing these issues, and how ATproto aims to bridge these gaps to hopefully, finally, create a truly open social web for all.
* I will start with a (hopefully) very brief explanation of how current social media services work, and introduce some basic terminology we will use from here on out.
* Armed with this knowledge, we will try to pinpoint *why* social media platforms suck so much these days; we'll try to pick apart what works, what doesn't, and what's actively harmful to different kinds of users.
* We will then do a case study on ActivityPub's core design, philosophy, and implementations (Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc). We will do a few case studies oh why these platforms failed to capture lightning in a bottle, and try to figure out *why* they seem to lack widespread appeal.
* I will then introduce a basic overview of ATproto, pointing out key design decisions and how they relate back to problems found in modern social media platforms and previous implementations of decentralized social media. We will use Bluesky and WhiteWind as a reference implementations of the protocol to see different aspects of the protocol in action.
* Finally, we will discuss how different social media platforms could be implemented within ATproto, as well as the current limitations of the protocol at time of writing.
This blog post is a living document: as aspects of the protocol get implemented or updated, I will update this post alongside it. Additionally, small edits might be made in previous sections to improve readability or ti better lead off into other sections
It has been frustrating seeing a protocol with so much potential have *so few* resources for the layperson to get a grasp of what makes the protocol special. On the one hand, I get it — part of the design of ATproto *is* to let people not have to worry or even think about the protocol, to make the experience within it as seamless and painless as possible. However, I think that at this particular inflection point in the social web, where the ecosystem feels more in flux now than it has in decades, I believe it is *incredibly* important to explain to people what is possible, if we let it be. This blog post is my own contribution to that. To what extent it succeeds is something that you, the reader, will have to decide for yourself.
# Concepts Introduction
To understand the modern ailments of social media, we must first understand some of the fundamental aspects of how they work. Networking might not be the most exciting topic to learn about (Don't worry, I'll try to make this as easy as possible); yet having a solid, even if basic, understanding of how social media networks work once you open the app yields a strong foundation for understanding how the technological, economic, and social foundations of social media led us to where we are today.
Let's start simple. Here's a drawing I made myself:
<!-- PHOTO OF SOMEWHAT SHITTY BUT FUN DRAWING -->
Beautiful, right? Let's say I want to share this drawing with my friends online. How would I go about doing that?
On our end, it's pretty simple; I open an app, make a post with the photo, and click "Post". After a second or two, my post is created, and anyone with a link to my post (including your friends) can see it. I don't have to know what happens in-between - all I have to know is that my post was made, and I can rest assured that anyone can see my drawing if they want to.
<!-- DRAWING OF ME SENDING THE DRAWING TO THE CLIENT. THE CLIENT HAS AN ARROW TO A BLACK BOX, WITH A QUESTION MARK. THE BLACK BOX HAS ARROWS LEADING OUT OF IT THAT LEADS TO MANY OTHER PHONES (CLIENTS), WHICH SHOWS MY DRAWING TO MANY PEOPLE-->"