Over the past 12 months I designed, built, and launched a dozen apps and experiences on the AT Protocol, including anisota.net, a calmer user interface for Bluesky, and Aturi, a toolkit for navigating the open ecosystem of apps built on the same protocol. Together these projects reached 100K+ unique visitors in their first year, earned me a shoutout from the stage of SXSW, landed me an appearance on CodeTV, and allowed me to present my work at Atmosphere Conference 2026. Before this, I spent a decade growing products, brands, and communities for tech companies in decentralized web, healthcare SaaS, and consumer SaaS.
How and why I created a "decentralized" approach to paywalls
We all know by now that I believe in the lexicon black market and an enjoy illegal atproto records. It's not my fault that Bluesky PBC allowed for such shenanigans! If the good lord had intended for us to walk, she wouldn't have invented roller skates.
Several years ago, back when Twitter was a thing and it had a decent API, my friend @goose.art did a weird little experiment where he made his avatar dynamic... it automatically changed appearances on a regular basis and became increasingly deep-fried (increased in distortion and lossy compression). I've seen several other people mess around with this concept since then, and I've always had it in the back of my head as something I wanted to eventually try for myself.
In November of 2007, Facebook made a tiny change to its user interface that would massively influence what we know of today as a 'post' on social media. What was that change?