is atproto blockchain without the coins?

Now, I won’t pretend to know much about atproto but I’ve been lurking in the atmosphere for a while, mainly on bsky, and I’m starting to notice some familiar things. In a good way!

The atproto community feels very similar to early-days, low-key web3. Not the crypto bros, hype merchants or scam peddlers. Not the Lambos, the NFTs or the libertarianism. I’m talking about the software engineers drawn in by the promise of decentralisation, data sovereignty and a return to the original, open fields of the early Internet!

When I first got into working in the blockchain space, I was disillusioned with the web we’d created - the walled gardens of mobile OSs, the number of Google apps I relied on and the feeling the technology of servers and databases had gone stale for me.

In 2017, working at the intersection of Ethereum, music copyright and licensing, and startup fever, I felt part of a movement - something that was genuinely exciting and had the potential to disrupt how we built and used software.

And the ICOs, the politics, the money - that was the uninteresting, unfortunately necessary side to it all. I loved the rest of it.

We were interested in using web standards and emerging protocols for identity, reputation and trust - DIDs, verifiable claims, IPFS, FOAF, JSONLD, OWL, OCAPs, P2P networks, PKI, web payments and so on.

We experimented with making data and identities portable between distinct UIs - like bringing your own frontend to browse your music catalogue.

And we played! Collectibles, design systems, wallet interfaces, games, token economics simulators, whatever! We went to conferences and meet-ups together to table ideas and trade stories.

Some of the same people were there as now. For instance, I remember watching Paul Frazee give a talk about Beaker Browser at a web3 meetup organised by Red Badger in Old Street.

It’s also fascinating to see the spaces between intersecting technology being explored - primarily, local/offline software and peer-to-peer networking, like iroh.

My hope is atproto is heading towards decentralisation for usability not decentralisation at all costs. Let’s see where it goes!

Thanks for reading!