ATProto San Francisco Meeting

On July 8th a bunch of people interested in ATProto met in San Francisco at the Internet Archive to share information about the projects they were working on. It was a very nice meeting space for this kind of event, thank you Internet Archive for hosting this!

Several ATProto projects were highlighted by Ted Han, who did his best to explain in a simple way exactly what ATProto is and a bunch of potential use cases for it. After Ted's talk (sorry couldn't resist the pun), we were treated to demonstrations of various new software projects that link up with Bluesky's ATProto to varying degrees.

In some way I felt out of place there because I'm merely a blogger with a dream, not a software engineer capable of making cool stuff for people to use, but in another way, I felt right at home because most of the people there seemed to share a similar dream. Our shared dream seems to be to wrest control of the internet away from Apple Google Facebook Microsoft etc.

Most of the presenters seemed very concerned with the question of "what happens to our data and products if Bluesky or their owners turn evil" which is very apropos in 2025 given how every big software company seems to have become quite evil. The simplest way to explain how they became evil is that far too much power accrued in the hands of too few people. The fact that power corrupts has been known to us for thousands of years, we have had countless revolts against authoritarians during that time but still haven't learned the lesson fully.

Corporate governance has become a joke in which CEOs are free to rule with an iron fist and every employee must obey all their most insane edicts. The boards of directors give a rubber stamp approval of all decisions and there are rarely ever any consequences for bad decisions.

I hope that the developers working with ATProto can put this malfeasant method of governance behind us, and usher in a new era where more key decisions are made in a more fair and democratic manner. It seems to me that the internet is ripe for being turned into a sort of online democracy where everyone can have some say in what happens both online and in the real world. We must seek to share power with as many people as possible, lest that power begin to corrupt us in the same way it has corrupted everyone else.