The Dawn of Commons-Based Peer Production

October 8, 2025 4:32 AM Subscribe

Open Social - “Open source has clearly won. Yes, there are plenty of closed source products and businesses. But the shared infrastructure—the commons—runs on open source.” (previously)

We might take this for granted, but it wasn’t a foregone conclusion thirty five years ago. There were powerful forces that wanted open source to lose. Some believed in the open source model but didn’t think it could ever compete with closed source. Many categories of tools only existed as closed source. A Microsoft CEO called open source cancer—a decade before Microsoft has rebuilt its empire around it. The open source movement may not have lived up to the ideals of the “free software”, but it won in industry adoption. Nobody gets fired for choosing open source these days. For much crucial software, open source is now the default.

I believe we are at a similar juncture with social apps as we have been with open source thirty five years ago. There’s a new movement on the block. I like to call it “open social”. There are competing visions for what “open social” should be like. I think the AT Protocol created by Bluesky is the most convincing take on it so far. It’s not perfect, and it’s a work in progress, but there’s nothing I know quite like it...

In this post, I’ll explain the ideas of the AT Protocol, lovingly called atproto, and how it changes the relationship between the user, the developer, and the product.

I don’t expect atproto and its ecosystem (known as the Atmosphere) to win hearts overnight. Like open source, it might take a few decades to become ubiquitous. By explaining these ideas here, I’m hoping to slightly nudge this timeline. Despite the grip of today’s social media companies, I believe open social will eventually seem inevitable in retrospect—just like open source does now. Good things can happen; all it takes is years of sustained effort by a community of stubborn enthusiasts.

So what is it all about?

What open source did for code, open social does for data.

You can just hack on ATProto - “Bluesky is both a decentralized protocol, called AtProto and a social media company, called Bluesky plc that develops both the protocol and one of the Apps running on the protocol, Bluesky.”

There is a lot more in the AT Protocol Paper, but the basics are this:

• Data for each user is hosted individually in a PDS - a personal data store - which is a database storing a collection of records that are cryptographically signed and encoded in DAG-CBOR format. The record schema is defined by a “lexicon”, which is dependent on the type of data being transferred. The records themselves are stored in a merkle search tree structure which makes it easy to rebalance records efficiently both on read and write. Its default storage engine is SQLite.
• Each user has a PDS, exposed as a web service to network indexers. There is an indexer, the relay, which “scrapes” but really hits all the PDSes in the network for updates. Right now there is only one true relay, run by Bluesky the company, and there is a lot of debate around what that means for a decentralized network and efforts to diversify and decentralize. To better get a sense for how the data model works, you can play around with this tool, which is what I spent a lot of time doing during this project. The TL; DR is that you can think of the At Proto Atmosphere as a collection of databases, or, really, websites, that the relay indexes and turns into the firehose. Data is then filtered on the firehose side for CSAM and other logic, before it’s turned into an AppView. The AppView is what you see if you sign into bsky.app.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s how web crawlers, including Google work, with the exception that their crawled results are not available to everyone for access.

Steve has a very nice write-up of all of this, with a beautiful ascii diagram.

Al(most) all of the data streaming through each person’s PDS is public, and enables the creation of projects like the Bluesky firehose as a screensaver, or goodfeeds, surfacing feeds across the network., or TikTok and Instagram-like apps. As you can imagine, the protocol then lends itself to a lot of nice experimentation (make sure to check the TOS/Developer guidelines before you do so).

also btw... This is for Everyone — Tim Berners-Lee’s manifesto for a better online world - “The World Wide Web inventor criticises the ‘rage bait’ of algorithms and social media — and advocates tighter user control of personal data.”

Whatever his accomplishments, the British inventor is also acutely anxious about the social ills that have mushroomed online — most notably the erosion of institutional trust, political polarisation and the mental health crisis afflicting the young. To his credit, the 70-year-old Berners-Lee is still fighting to preserve the web’s original promise, which, he argues, has been despoiled by malign users, rapacious corporations and authoritarian governments.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Berners-Lee’s chirpy book This Is For Everyone is both an engaging history of the origins and evolution of the web and an ingenious road map for how we can reclaim control over our digital lives. His big idea, which has now become his latest personal obsession, is to restore data sovereignty to every individual by redesigning the web. To that end, he has launched a new protocol and founded a start-up to help return ownership of data to users.

Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google - “Google is often criticized for losing its way and becoming like the antisocial profit-maximizing corporations that it sought to replace. Ethereum has decentralization baked in at a much deeper technical and social layer, and I would argue that the low-risk defi use case creates a lot of alignment between ‘doing well’ and ‘being good’, to a degree that does not exist for advertisement. By ‘low-risk defi’ I include both the basic function of payments and savings, and well-understood tools like synthetic assets and fully collateralized lending, and the ability to exchange between these assets.”[1,2,3]