Well, I've never been one to blog, micro-blog or generally share my thoughts online so I might as well start the process by implying my age with a old Slashdot era joke. If you don't get the joke in the title of the post then congratulations, you are younger and less dorky than me!
Here's the general shape of how I hope this all shakes out. I'm an experienced systems/embedded/game developer that has never really gotten into web development or social networking. There's a lot of reasons for that but the obnoxiousness of silicon valley funded firms was a huge factor.
Now, can the distributed nature of ATproto convince me to dive into a more online world? Did the fascist mask slipping of big tech billionaires convince me and millions of others to dump the existing social platforms for a less user hostile model? Is webdev actually kind of fun? These are the kinds of questions I hope to answer in the coming months and years.
After a few days of poking at the internals of ATproto I can say that I actually kind of like what's going on in the inside. The MST structure at the center of the personal repositories is a delightful design and I feel like I could create some incredible apps with a fully decentralized content-addressable shared system. A lot of my wilder ideas of truly capturing the hope and idealism of the early internet are flooding back so here's hoping I can come up with something interesting in the near future.