Open Social — overreacted
October 6, 2025
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.
(Disclosure: I used to work at Bluesky on the Bluesky client app. I wasn’t involved in the protocol design. I am a fan, and this post is my attempt to explain why.)
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.
Source: Open Social — overreacted
Dan Abramov is the co-author of Redux and the creator of Create React App. Someone who has thought deeply about open source software for many years.
Here he looks at the parallels between open source and open social, in particular the ATProtocol that underpins BlueSky but which promises to enable federated social applications in a way that is not beholden to centralised services, the way that traditional social media like Twitter, Instagram, and so on were.
If you haven’t been paying a lot of attention, there is definitely something very interesting happening in this space with ATProtocol and with Mastodon. It’s hard, given how dominant traditional, centralised social media platforms (which are really products) have been, to break out of thinking about social media in that way.
Re-imagining what social media can be in an age of distributed protocols is potentially extremely interesting.
