A Bit of Backstory

To begin: a conundrum. Should my introduction be funny? Entertaining? Informative? Interesting? All of the above? But what if all the above are subjective?

This is why I don't blog often: indecision plus a lack of confidence in my ability to say meaningful things in unique ways.

But let's try anyway, because this is a new era and a new world.

Instead of a list of accomplishments or a recitation of failed dreams, I thought I'd explain why I'm so excited about AT Protocol.

I've been building web sites and web apps and ecommerce platforms and marketplaces and business tools on the internet since the mid 1990s. My college roommate and I built our first websites in 1995 at the University of Illinois with raw HTML, Hot Dog Editor, Netscape 1.0, and a bit of perl to make those fancy contact forms and Guestbooks everyone loved.

The Internet in 1995 was itself a whole new world. We had stumbled into something exciting and enormous. An interconnected web of ideas shared across the globe.

On random newgroups, a few kids in the middle of Illinois could discuss the environment, movies, tv, music, politics with people in California, Alaska, and New York, with people in Europe, Australia, and Africa. I interacted with my favorite authors and the creators of my favorite tv shows. They say your world grows when you leave for college. Boy what an understatement.

Soon, text based listservs and newsgroups evolved into a visual cacophony of messy fan sites, storefronts under construction, blinking marquees, and a glitzy place called geocities. Google hadn't been born yet. Apple existed mostly in the past. If you were lucky, Yahoo! would list your website on their search engine, but you had to track down the proper category and manually submit it. The Internet felt infinitely scaleable before I even understood those words, and it hadn't yet become dominated by infinitely resourced brand names.

I loved all of it. I skipped most of my college classes to learn everything I could. How do you write HTML? How do you make framesets? What is java? How is it different than JavaBeans or JavaScript? Why do modems make that weird sound? What is TCP/IP? What is a Telnet client?! HOW FAST IS A BAUD?!?!

I didn't understand most of it. But it allowed me to build an interface that could be accessed by anyone in the world at any time. My words, my ideas, my vision reaching further than I thought possible. What a wild concept that was. I couldn't begin to visualize the miracles that would one day exist on the phones in our pockets.

I often remind my kids, as they embark on their adult lives, that my entire career in web development didn't exist when I started college. It wasn't an option. Few had conceived of it. What was a "webmaster"?!

In those early days, anything felt possible (except getting paid to build websites). The people who felt the Internet's potential, who interacted with the world in these new ways every day, oozed a shared enthusiasm and humanity. The world could change. The globe could shrink. Everyone could prosper. The dream never felt farfetched.

And yes, there are bad faith actors on the internet. And yes, there are now massive corporations feeding off your innate human desire for dopamine, trading your personal information and behaviors for money. But it's not all evil. The ideas are still valid. The potential still exists.

And that's why so many of us find our way to the Atmosphere. To the Fediverse. To the expansive internet thriving beyond the garden walls.

We dream of what might be. We dream of a better internet. We dream of shared online humanity and experiences ungoverned by wealth or power or anything other than basic human goodness. The dreams remain lofty, but they are not beyond our grasp.

Every time I explore the Atmosphere, every time I open BlueSky or read an AT Protocol discussion or see a standard.site blog, I'm reminded of those dreams and of those early internet days. The enthusiasm. The possibility. The shared sense of community and desire to improve the world. I've missed that. And I'm excited to discover it again. And I want to help it spread.

My goal with this blog is to try making sense of the Atmosphere. Not just for myself, but for less technical people. How do we get past the jargon that causes people to tune out, grow indifferent, or get confused? How can I explain the Atmosphere to my parents? How can we share our enthusiasm without words like lexicon and identity and protocol? People didn't flock to the World Wide Web because they thought "Hypertext Markup Language" sounded sexy.

I don't have any answers. But I'm thrilled to be here for the conversation. By trying to make sense of it for everyone, I hope to foster a deeper understanding of it for myself. I do, after all, plan to build on it.

So welcome to my little blog on the Atmosphere. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you, and I hope you're doing well.

I'm Kevin. And I'm excited about the future, even if there's a lot of work to do.

(Also, shout out to pckt.blog for this nifty platform!)