The under-the-radar tech revolution that could change how the internet works

There is something meaningful happening under the tech surface and few people are noticing it.

This past weekend, I attended the ATmosphere Conference in Seattle, the first conference about the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. You likely haven’t heard about it and what it does, but you’ve certainly heard of the social network built using this protocol: Bluesky. (The company’s CEO, Jay Graber, spoke at the conference).

Contrary to X/Twitter and Threads, the AT Protocol — and, for instance, Bluesky — provides the mechanism for a decentralized open social web. Users own their identity and their data, including their social graph. That means the AT Protocol will foster competitors to Bluesky and you’ll be able to move your data to a different app when it suits you, and still have your content and identity available in all other apps. 

That alone is a meaningful change to how we build social apps today. However, the AT Protocol design provides mechanisms to build a whole new generation of web services in ways that will disrupt many of the existing “Web 2.0” players that you came to love and hate. It’s designed to be extensible, so anyone can build an app using this protocol, and interoperate with other apps that understand that extension. Think of a series of apps that allow users to publish and consume job listings, car rides, or concert tickets. 

Over the weekend, Barack Obama officially joined Bluesky and added more fuel to this nascent system.

Bluesky is the butterfly in the room. It started in 2019 as an exploration project by Twitter on how to create a decentralized social network that ensures no single entity controls everything. The company developed the Authenticated Transfer (AT) protocol and built the app, launching in private beta in early 2023 and publicly in early 2024. It has grown to over 33 million users. What’s more impressive is that Bluesky is building the AT Protocol that itself can be replaced by competitors. More on that later.

Web 1.0, version 2 (and a whiff of Web3)

The internet became what it is not only because of its utility but also because it was built on top of open protocols. You’ve heard about HTTP, TCP, HTML, SMTP (email), and more.

Two attributes that made the World Wide Web what it is today is that you don’t have to pay anyone (or ask for permission) to use these protocols, and, once your service is running, you are playing in the arena. There is no organization that must approve your service or application.

Web 2.0 brought us walled gardens. The social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), the content services (YouTube, Medium, Apple Podcast, etc.), and the app stores. Although Time magazine chose “You” as the Person of the Year in 2006, it came with strings attached. Your identity, content, and applications lived within these walled gardens and they made it hard for others to access it — even you!

App developers, content creators, and third-party services live in fear of the power of these organizations to change their policies, de-monetize them, or block access to vital traffic or resources.

The AT Protocol changes this in a dramatic way. It allows your identity and your data to be portable across “hosts,” interoperable across applications, and controlled by you. 

The best analogy I can think of is your email. There isn’t any entity who can control who you send email to or who sends email to you. If you have a custom email address, like I do, you can take your identity (your email address) and your data to another organization or run your email server. You also don’t need to be on the same email service as other people to add them to your contact list or share text, images, or documents with them. 

In that sense, the AT Protocol feels to me like a continuation of Web 1.0, and not an evolution of Web 2.0.

During the conference, I couldn’t stop thinking of each tech company built over the last 20 years, and how it will be rebuilt on the AT Protocol for the benefit of the users — think Airbnb, Shopify, Eventbrite, Zillow, Indeed, LinkedIn, Slack, and more. It won’t look like the existing players. There will be dozens of companies providing each of these services, playing in the same arena, and sharing each other’s data — like there are thousands of email providers today.  

The AT Protocol reminisces of the dream of the Semantic Web, from the early 2000s — the idea of adding structured data to the web so more powerful services could be built. Unfortunately, it became an academic that never fully materialized, much less in the context of social networking. The AT Protocol opens doors for a new version of the Semantic Web, so that organizations can expose content that will be consumed by apps and aggregators. 

The protocol is not built on blockchain — however, many of the underlying technologies and principles came from Web3. The conversations I heard at the ATmosphere Conference around decentralization, control, governance, and data custodian sounded exactly like the conversations about blockchain, but in a different — and feasible — tech stack. A stack that works at scale — Bluesky is the living proof of it.

PNW is the epicenter of the AT Protocol

Bluesky, the inventors of the AT Protocol, is headquartered in Seattle. Graber, the founder and CEO, made headlines two weeks ago by wearing a shirt at SXSW with the words “Mundus sine caesaribus” in Latin, which translates to “a world without Caesars.” That was a poke at Mark Zuckerberg who wore a shirt saying “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (”Either Zuck or Nothing”), a playing in the Latin “Aut Caesar aut nihil” (”Either Caesar or nothing”) — a saying associated with pursuing power at any cost.

But there is more to it than a poke at Zuckerberg. It’s an ethos for Bluesky and the community behind the AT Protocol to design each aspect of the technology so it can’t be controlled by a single person or entity.

Boris Mann, a technologist and founder, led the organization of the ATmosphere Conference — atmosphere is a play on the AT prefix and the idea that it’s around us, no one controls it, and it sustains life. They held it at the University of Washington with more than 170 people in attendance, and another 150 watching online. The energy reminded me of the early waves of technology that had a meaningful impact in society. It had rooms full of builders, tinkerers, and early explorers.

Skylight is another Seattle-based startup also building on the AT Protocol. Its product is a social short-video experience, the equivalent to TikTok and Instagram Reels. It’s wrong to think of Skylight as a TikTok clone. The experience might feel very similar, but users will be able to pack their data and move to another similar service when they want to and continue to benefit from the audience they’ve built.

Another startup is Graze. The idea of creating a custom feed is an odd one when thinking about Twitter, Threads, or Facebook. Graze, a Portland-based startup, is tackling this problem. They allow users to create and share custom feeds. Want a feed that only includes sports posts? You got it.

The Pacific Northwest is teeming with a vibrant community of software engineers, hackers, UX designers, and others tinkering, building tooling and frameworks, and exploring the technological, social, and economical impact of the AT Protocol and all its apps.

The long road

Keeping with the Latin theme, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

At the conference, I mentioned to an attendee how AI is “sucking the air” from other tech innovations, and there weren’t VCs, journalists, and clout-chasers present. She answered with, “that’s a good thing.” It gives time for a solid foundation to be built and fewer interests pulling-and-pushing. There are foundational building blocks that need to be built, such as end-to-end encryption, geolocation, monetization mechanisms, and interface extensibility. 

You will see more apps built on the AT Protocol this year. You won’t realize it, like you don’t know which cloud provider is being used by Netflix. However, it will matter when your experience is better because the barriers of the social and content graph are broken across apps. You would find it absurd if you use Gmail and you could only send messages to other Gmail users. These are the promises of the AT Protocol — portability, interoperability, and user control.

Bluesky is the current killer app for the AT Protocol. Its approach to building the protocol, the application, and the social network at the same time is strategically sound. However, they must continue to foster and collaborate with an independent community of app builders to ensure their own success through the success of the AT Protocol. They must continue to grow their network and attract influencers and connectors, so the full vision of an open social web — a world without Caesars — can come to fruition.