On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message requesting ideas for a new incubator and fund to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed emerged with an initial commitment of $1 million.

This turnaround, a speed underscored by the fact that the fund doesn't even have a website yet (it does have a Bluesky profile, though), is testament to several things: the hype around Bluesky, which is emerging as a lifeboat for millions who have abandoned X (née Twitter). But there's also an almost tangible hope that by starting afresh on a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network such as the AT Protocol, we might avoid the ad-driven, walled gardens that permeate social networking today.

"The vast majority of Facebook's revenue is from ads. All the major centralized social media companies are advertising companies, which means they trade in traffic and the users' attention," Wang told TechCrunch in an interview this week. "The main difference between an open protocol versus a closed one is that the closed ones will never tolerate the existence of applications that take the content of the graph away, and take user-attention away from their properties."

The decentralized web

Wang is co-founder, chief AI and innovation officer, and former CEO of Anaconda, a company built upon the eponymous open source Python and R distribution that helps data scientists build, test, and deploy all their data-driven projects.

Separately, Wang has been an avid backer of the decentralized web, providing financial support for projects such as Blue Link Labs, which developed the peer-to-peer open source web browser Beaker. Official support for Beaker ended in 2022, with creator Paul Frazee joining Bluesky as "protocol engineer" before formally becoming CTO in April.

And this foundational work on Beaker was to Bluesky's benefit. "While the Beaker project is coming to an official end, the heart of Beaker continues with Bluesky," Frazee wrote in a post announcing the end of Beaker. "I hope the work we do will make Beaker's end a little less painful in the long run."

Fast-forward to today, and Wang is extending his support for decentralization into a formal seed fund. "I've done angel investing, but this is my first time creating a fund and taking responsibility for other people's money," Wang said. "I was funding Paul [Frazee] and his team for a number of years. They tried different things to build decentralized web technologies, with middling to low success. But all those lessons learned, I think, have fed into the [Bluesky] design, the protocol, and the apps."

While the decentralized web is far from a novel concept, what it has lacked is a meaningful number of people gravitating toward something like the AT Protocol: an open source, open standards-based framework that promises the ability to enable users to retain ownership of their data and shift to other platforms on the protocol.

"There are people who have been in the decentralized web community for a long time, who have really waited for this moment," Wang said. "We've had lots of good ideas; we've just not had the users. Now we have the users."

"Like the internet in 1996"

After posting his request for ideas in mid-November, Wang says he ...