I too want the internet to be better. I want this for altruistic reasons, as I think the internet offers a unique and important value to society, but also selfish ones. The internet's my home, where my friends and family are, where I do activities I care about, and build things for the future.
It's been a rough go for the internet though. The things I love have not been lost, but they've been increasingly crowded out. Some portion of this has been driven by the fundamentals of software creation. The zero marginal cost of distribution, and the very high costs of creation, coupled with the non-linear returns to concentrating data, enables the social media monopolies.
Atproto does a lot to change the dynamics of data. Coding agents change the dynamics of software creation.
This will definitely affect new software, but I'm also pretty interested in how it'll change how we interface with the current software regime. Maybe we can use code generation to seize the data and relationships locked inside them.
Previously this has been a pretty lopsided cat and mouse game. Look at the insane lengths Meta goes to in order to thwart ad blockers. But if we can just run an agent1 to look at their markup, maybe even just in time inside the end-users browser, how can they thwart that?
Even more excitingly though maybe this makes userscripts viable again! I'm really excited by this idea that the browser can be a true dynamic user agent, creating software just-in-time not to shut people off from social software, but to modulate their relationship to it.
I'm very inspired by Beeper, a tool to connect all your messaging platforms into one interface. The social networks really don't want you to be able to do that to feeds, but how are they going to stop the swarm of agents?
There's a world where this capability drives the big companies off the internet and toward more locked down platforms where they can control more2. Unforunately for them, I think this capability will also just enable more useful stuff for users. So they'll just get outcompeted.
This is all pretty uncertain, but I remain pretty excited about the future of the internet.