I am very excited about AT Protocol

AT Protocol is revitalizing creative corners of the web. That feels important.

It’s got a distinctly human feel: people create things, and those things get remixed and reimagined by other people, and the community rallies around encouraging and celebrating each other’s work.

For the last couple years, I’ve felt my general sense of excitement around building things taper off.

I had mostly attributed that to my situation changing: I moved into my current role at CodeTV and started focusing more on production than development. But that didn’t really sit right with me, because I’ve always had some kind of web thing going on the side that I’d tinker with while watching tv or as procrastination when I didn’t want to do my actual job.

My tinkering was always driven by my curiosity about something that was happening in the space. Some new tool or technique or idea that I’d get excited about and want to try.

But for the last couple years, I just… couldn’t really care. Most of the discussion seemed to be about how to not write code, and while I don’t really care how other people do their work, I’m just not getting much of a reward from that kind of stuff.

AT Protocol brought back my interest in building stuff.

One of the big reasons is that websites are built up of chunks of data — posts, photos, interactions, etc. — and a long-running dream of mine has been to exist everywhere, but aggregate to my own space. I want a “start here” page for myself that doesn’t just send people to other websites, but pulls a sampling of what I’ve actually published to those sites to give the viewer a better sense of what I do on each platform before they click over to check it out.

After all: it’s my content. I want it to live anywhere (and everywhere) that I choose, without a cumbersome process of manually copying everything I do to a central archive.

The AT Protocol makes this possible by letting me create whatever I want in my own place (a PDS) using an existing data structure (lexicon) or defining a custom one if none exist for what I’m creating. Other sites using atproto can then syndicate the content I’ve created.

This is the dream: publish once, show up in all the appropriate places.

I’m excited that we, as website builders who publish things, can continue using our websites. And by using shared lexicons — like Standard Site — to publish records on atproto, other people can access what we publish however they prefer.

Maybe they use our site, or maybe they use an atproto app that can display our content (like Leaflet or Pckt or Offprint), or maybe they build a custom app for themselves because there are no rules you can do whatever you want because the data is available to everyone.

I find all of that to be very exciting, and I’m finding renewed energy to build things again.

So anyways go watch this episode of Web Dev Challenge about atproto and see if your excitement about web dev comes back.