A decade ago, the decentralized web movement made a generational bet: that we could build computing infrastructure that respects users, distributes power, and stays open to anyone who wants to participate. Ten years later, the question isn't whether the ideas were right. It's whether any of them can survive contact with the scale of mainstream use.
Bluesky has spent the last few years trying to answer that question in production. The result is the Atmosphere: a network now home to tens of millions of accounts, built on the AT Protocol, designed from the start with the assumption that openness only holds up if it can carry the weight of a real social network.
In this talk, Paul Frazee — CTO of Bluesky and one of the codesigners of the AT Protocol — will walk through the design choices that flowed from a single conviction: that to achieve an open network, you have to start from scale. He'll cover what the team learned from prior peer-to-peer systems about where the open web has historically broken down, how the AT Protocol's design (relays, lexicons, account portability, composable moderation) was shaped by those lessons, and why decentralization-as-architecture is different from decentralization-as-value.
The talk is a candid look at the tradeoffs Bluesky has made, the ones the team is still arguing about internally, and what's next as the Atmosphere expands beyond microblogging into other application categories. It's aimed at builders who want to understand the engineering and design choices behind an open network at scale — and what they imply for the next decade of decentralized infrastructure.