Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of...

Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies. I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time.1 Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their strengths, but in recent years I’ve become increasingly bullish on the prospect of an open social web based in AT Protocol (or atproto). Perhaps most important, its basis in individual ‘Personal Data Servers’ (PDSs), as a user-empowerment mechanism that also solves for centralisation, is very exciting. Secondarily, the use of domains as public identifiers is super neat. At the technical level,…