Thirty Years Online, and I Never Owned the Ground

From Windows 95 to the AT Protocol, and why this is the last time I rebuild this site (at least the backend).

In 1994 I was running the Windows product support team at Microsoft Canada and writing the support plan for Windows 95. I spent a fair bit of that year in meetings where capable people argued about whether the internet would ever be worth anything. The commercial value was genuinely in question. Some of the smartest people at MS thought it was a toy. I didn't. I'd come up through school on IRC, gopher and telnet, you found things by knowing where they were because nothing indexed anything. By then I had an early build of Internet Explorer on my desk and could see the argument was already settled. The only open questions were how fast it would arrive and how much it would be worth. When CompuServe and AOL came online, we pushed MSN, and I moved with the team to help stand up MSN Canada. That was the moment the shape of it got obvious to me. Commerce was the least of it. Data moving between people, knowledge getting out of the few hands that held it and into everyone else's. I left to go build that. I started a B2B business in the dot com era and built an online platform. I did not win the dot com lottery but I was on the frontier. What I got instead was ten years of rebuilding a CMS over and over while the service underneath it quietly reshaped how a few vertical industries ran on. Along with the Web 2.0 social media bang we shifted the old Magazine and news publishing cycles that had worked the same way for decades. They were suddenly trying to keep up while we shifted the news turn-around cycle from a month to a day. Then Web 3.0 arrived and I went down the proof of work road, working with token systems that paid creators in stake and reward instead of exposure. Inflationary by design, and a mess as often as not. None of this was spectator stuff. I lived in it. Here is the part I didn't notice for a long time. Every one of those homes belonged to someone else, in some way. The thing that finally clicked I was researching Pejorative before I wrote a word of it. The book circles around sovereignty, who actually holds power over a thing and who only thinks they do. While I was in that headspace the rhetoric coming out of the US started bleeding into everything, and the phrase that kept surfacing was data sovereignty. I was hearing it at work and writing it into the notes for the book. The theme of the book had quietly become the real question. I'd been on Bluesky since it opened, plus a few others like Spoutible, mostly trying to get clear of what Twitter had turned into. I ended up on Gander Social too. I genuinely can't remember how I found it, which bothers me more than it should. What mattered was what they had in common. They were built on the AT Protocol, and they were taking the sovereignty question seriously instead of putting it on a slide. ATmosphere in Vancouver was the turn. I came away from that and got my hands on the protocol directly, hitting personal data servers, Bluesky and Eurosky, still waiting on Gander to open theirs. Small solutions, mostly. Proof to myself that the thing worked the way I hoped. The flame The moment itself was almost stupidly small. I was updating an article on my own site and went looking for a clean way to cross-post it. I found a WordPress plugin that pushed to Bluesky using the Standard.site lexicon, and the whole thing turned over in my head. Because that is the trick, sitting right there. The content doesn't have to live in the site. It lives in the network, in records I own, tied to an identity I control. The site just reads them and renders them. Push and pull. The page becomes a window onto content I keep elsewhere. A headless CMS, except nobody owns the head. If you know HIVE, you already feel the shape of it. Underneath all of it sit DIDs, decentralised identifiers, which I think are about to graduate from niche acronym to the thing everything else hangs off. Portable identity that travels with you instead of being issued to you by whoever you signed up with last. That's a whole other post. I have several whole other posts stacking up. What I'm actually building I'm rebuilding jasonbu.online so it reads my content rather than owning it. I write somewhere, the words land in the network as records I own, and my site reads them. So does Bluesky. So could yours. When you turn up, whether you're on my site or Bluesky or somewhere I've never heard of, you can read, reply, like and repost, and it propagates back across the network because it was never trapped in one place to begin with. That is the common digital town square the way it was supposed to work, before we let it get fenced and sold off by the lot. I've started thinking of this as the Personal Web. Maybe Web 3.5, if that version number is not taken, sitting between the walled social platforms of 2.0 and whatever 3.0 was before it wandered off. The name needs work. But the idea doesn't. The honest reason I'm doing it is simpler than any of that. I am tired of moving house. Thirty years of porting my words onto the next platform, then the next CMS, each one certain it would be the last one I'd need. I'm an early adopter, which in technology is a useful instinct and a recurring tax. This time I own the ground. I'm putting my words somewhere I hold the keys, and pointing everything else at them. That's the start. I'll take you through the rest as I build it, the wins and the parts that fight back. There's a more technical series coming too, over in the Lab, for anyone who wants to see the wiring. For now: I never owned the ground. I'm fixing that.

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