What Comes After Web 2.0?
Remember Web 1.0? The early internet era ended around 20 years ago. But if you were already online back then, you must remember the flashing <blink> tags, the “under construction” GIFs — and a real sense of ownership over what you put on the web. Your webpage truly was your own personal space.
Alas, the early web was not very interactive! As social creatures, we don’t just want to publish documents that link to each other. We also want to interact with other people — and we want to do that in shared online spaces.
The Web 2.0 era platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit provided those spaces, but something got lost along the way. We have no meaningful ownership over our data. If a platform evolves in a direction we disagree with, what can we do? If we leave, we’ll lose all our connections. All the effort we’ve invested into those platforms would have been in vain. We are locked in — the rational move is to stay even when it’s not in our interests.
Some say we need to go back to the drawing board. But perhaps we need not a radical reimagining but a little tweak — mixing just enough of the user-centric Web 1.0 ethos into the Web 2.0 world. What could that future look like?
What if it’s already built?
Join Dan Abramov for an informal preview of his upcoming talk about the AT Protocol developed at Bluesky — an attempt to create the minimal necessary building blocks for a people-first, user-controlled social interactive web.
About the speaker
Dan Abramov is a software engineer currently working at Bluesky. Before Bluesky, Dan used to work on the React team at Meta.