The core of what Vale is talking about is real: ATproto does make the data it uses more accessible. That makes it ripe for experimentation and innovation — which is why it's so appealing to people who tinker and build things, like he does. It's the values he's attaching to it — control, openness, freedom — that I question. They're still building on a foundation that was laid in the interest of generating profits for a corporation, and that conditions the use to which all that data will be put.
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ATproto is a Web3 project built to look like a Web 2.0 community for people who don't realize that what they really miss is Web 1.0.
Some people seem to think that Web 2.0 was when the internet suddenly became social. The internet was always social, though; social connection is its core functionality. Web 2.0 is the threshold at which companies stepped in to facilitate and monetize those connections. That made it possible to socialize online without learning the intricacies of navigating the web, which opened up online socialization (as well as exploitation of personal data) to a much broader spectrum of people.
Other people talk as though you couldn't really build on the internet prior to Web 2.0, but it's almost the opposite. The "here comes everybody" effect of Web 2.0 means that there are far more people online today who don't know how to build web pages or apps, because nearly everyone online during Web 1.0 was learning to build in one capacity or another, even if they were just setting up macros for their IRC client or copying someone's "under construction" animation for their own web page.
What Web 2.0 did was allow builders to piggyback on the big infrastructure projects owned by VC capitalists and the start-ups they funded. You could build stuff before the Twitter API, but with it, you could build stuff that leveraged the input of a million people — which is also a way of saying that you could build stuff that benefitted Twitter. But there were people building similar foundations before Web 2.0 — in fact, 2.0 behemoths like Twitter wouldn't have existed without e.g. SMS or RSS.
And the thing about Web 2.0 and Web3 is that they're marketing speak. They're designed to give you the impression that the internet is versioned, that prior ways of building and connecting are obsolete, surpassed by subscription services, then blockchain ledgers, then agentic LLM chatbots, and whatever cash cow comes next. But the cultural structures that they dismiss as "Web 1.0" are continuous; they're still with us; we continue to build and congregate those ways; they still grow and evolve.
