I just can't shake this feeling...

'The White Stone Temple Lost in the Hills' by jjfwh

On the surface, the promise of the AT Protocol is so seductive. Decentralised! Portable! Independent!

It feels genuinely empowering to 'own' my activity, my identity, and my social graph entirely. It reads like a corrective to the enshittified increasingly-corporate internet we’ve inhabited for decades.

But when I actually look at that raw data (using tools like PDSls.dev ) the illusion thins a little. 'My stuff' is actually just blobs of text sitting on a machine I don’t own , maintained by (very nice I'm sure) folks I don’t know , funded by money I didn't contribute .

And that’s where the unease creeps in.

What’s the plan here?

Someone is paying for the hosting, the bandwidth, the processing, the indexing, the backups. Someone is footing the bills for a convenience I call 'ownership'. Someone has all my stuff!

It all feels so generous, but it also feels fragile.

I’m building on the protocol myself. I spin up apps, experiment with ideas, create little experiences. None of that requires me to pay a cent for backend storage or heavy lifting. I rely on infrastructure provided by people who have no direct relationship with me.

Sure, in theory I can host myself, but I'm pretty sure most of the 40m users 🎉 won't want to or know how to do that.

Investors have poured millions into Bluesky and the protocol.

What’s the strategy that justifies that kind of outlay? Why pour millions into a system that currently makes no money? What happens when the funding environment changes, or when the bills need paying, or when the goodwill runs out, or when investors finally call in their chips? What happens to the apps, the data, the identities and the communities built on infrastructure we don’t actually own or control? How is this sustainable?

What’s the plan here?

History repeating?

It reminds me of the early web, when everything felt free and abundant, until it wasn't.

Until we realised the real cost to our culture, our media, our society, and our minds was tucked away just out of sight. Until we realised we everything got devalued because the underlying economics were ignored.

It feels uncomfortably familiar: the optimism, the free-for-all, and the quiet avoidance of who’s actually paying for the foundations.

I can’t help wondering sometimes if we’re repeating the pattern, watching history repeat itself, running on borrowed time and borrowed money, building castles in the sand.

Please tell me I have nothing to fear, because I quite like it here.

B. Prendergast 👋 (@renderg.host)

💖 Makes things make sense 🤔 Writes about science, tech, people, products & the messy in-betweens 🌿 Designs to ease your org's growing pains 🐳 Specialises in product strategy and design for complex systems ☮️ Posts are IMHO ⧉ https://links.renderg.host