Comment by danrobi

Paul Frazee’s. From Dat to AT Protocol:

Paul Frazee’s decision to archive the Beaker Browser project in December 2022 and shift focus from the Dat protocol (now evolved as Hypercore) to the development of the AT Protocol indeed represents a significant pivot in his career. Many observers in the decentralized-web community, including yourself, continue to regard the pure peer-to-peer architecture of Dat and Beaker as an elegant and philosophically pure approach to user-controlled data and hosting. It is understandable to view this transition as a regrettable departure from what appeared, at the time, to be the most coherent solution.

To provide context grounded in Frazee’s own documented reflections, he invested several years (2016–2022) in Beaker as a peer-to-peer browser built atop Dat/Hypercore. The system enabled one-click website creation, forking of sites, and early experiments with social applications such as Rotonde and Fritter. However, in his official post-mortem on the Beaker archive notice, Frazee outlined the practical limitations that led to discontinuation. https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/blob/master/archive-...

He explicitly noted that the project “never solved the hard problems” required for broad adoption, particularly for dynamic social networking. In a more detailed 2024 essay titled “Why isn’t Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?,” Frazee elaborated on the specific shortcomings of pure peer-to-peer models when applied to large-scale social systems.

He concluded that insisting on a fully device-hosted peer-to-peer network for a mainstream social platform “would’ve been a mistake,” given users’ unwillingness to sacrifice features or reliability for theoretical decentralization benefits.

The AT Protocol, which Frazee helped architect as Bluesky’s CTO (a role he continues to hold as of early 2026), represents a deliberate hybrid synthesis rather than an abandonment of prior principles. It retains core peer-to-peer innovations—cryptographically signed user data repositories, hosting agility, Merkle-tree-based verification, and portable identities—while delegating aggregation, indexing, and high-scale delivery to dedicated infrastructure (Personal Data Servers, relays, and AppViews).

This design enables the data sovereignty and forkability that Dat/Beaker championed, while delivering the performance, discoverability, and moderation capabilities necessary for widespread use. The ongoing FreeSky initiative, discussed in our prior exchange, further advances this by providing independent Personal Data Servers and relays, reducing reliance on Bluesky-operated infrastructure and realizing more of the original portability vision.

The Dat/Hypercore protocol itself was not discontinued; it continues under the Holepunchto organization and powers other applications. Thus, the technical lineage persists in parallel. In technology development, particularly within decentralized systems, iterative refinement based on empirical constraints is common. Frazee has publicly framed the transition as an application of lessons from multiple prior projects (including Secure Scuttlebutt and CTZN) rather than a repudiation.

Whether one regards the shift as a misstep or a pragmatic evolution depends on the relative weighting of ideological purity versus practical adoption and usability at scale. Bluesky’s growth to millions of users and the expanding AT Protocol ecosystem suggest the hybrid model has achieved broader traction than pure peer-to-peer social experiments previously attained.

In summary, FreeSky embodies the practical "alternative" envisioned in early AT Protocol discussions—offering decentralized hosting and tools within the Bluesky-compatible network rather than a separate platform. For those interested in trying it, start by exploring custom handles through freesky.social or reviewing the dashboard for operational insights. Additional details are available via Project Liberty announcements and AT Protocol documentation at atproto.com