This is the concluding post in a (very) occasional series I began writing a few months back called 'The Garden'. In the first two posts, I mainly tried to diagnose what I think is wrong with the way the internet is structured.

That, in itself, is something of a redundant task when you think about it, because we all know how fucked it all is; we live it every single day. We can see, in real time, the enshittification of service after service. I mean, in one day last week I saw three separate articles on Meta; one about them posting AI-generated child pornography as adverts, one about them being fined for not safeguarding children, and one about them paying far-right influencers to create rage bait. A company that only yesterday settled that lawsuit on child safety to the tune of $18billion, without accepting any responsibility for their actions.

Despite these issues, it will generate $243.46 billion in ad revenue in 2026. And it’s not even the worst social media outlet out there.

Something has gone deeply, deeply wrong.

Gil Duran has a book out this month called The Nerd Reich, which examines the place that the tech billionaires have taken in today’s societies as the kind of villains that the scriptwriters of the new Bond film would chuck out for being too cartoonish (all while cashing in their Bezos cheques). But as grand as the problems these hyper-bastards have caused are, what with all the eroding democratic norms, poisoning global discourse and melting the planet down to a tiny, tiny nub, there’s something almost as bad amongst their crimes.

They made the internet shit.

I found out a few years back that there’s a particularly wanky term for people born in the same three-to-four-year window as me: an Xennial. We’re the poor fuckers born on the perineum that divides Gen X and Millennials, a micro-generation that remembers life before the internet, then came of age just as this awful new world of ours was being birthed. We grew up with landlines, cassette tapes, handwritten notes, white dog shit, and physical maps. You know, all the fucking ancient stuff that feels like it might as well be in black and white. So we had the kinds of carefree (not actually carefree) sepia toned (actually normally toned) childhoods you can now see badly recreated by AI over on your Nan’s Facebook feeds, then hit our late teens and twenties just as email, mobile phones and the early web took over.

And ruined everything.

But that means we remember the good shit. Those halcyon days of The Early Internet. Livejournal and forums and Lomography and Megatokyo and the Raw Nerve music forum. We remember the promise of the internet. I remember making the argument to my Dad that if the long arc of history bends toward justice, then the internet would only hasten that turn.

What an idiot I was.

But I do think that, in those early days of the internet, there were ways that we could have protected the promise of the internet. And, because I am improbably just as much of an idiot as I was back then, I think we can still find our way back.

Creeping Vines

The two key developments that led to the enshittification of the Internet, in my entirely worthless opinion, were apps and algorithms. Oh, sure, having a simple app was great. No loading a webpage every time; it’s right there! On your phone! But the need to have an app on your phone gave greater credence to the idea that each service would be a walled garden, a self-contained little world that you couldn’t easily navigate away from, which allowed companies to lock us in, build those walls too high to climb over, and turn the money pump to EXTRACT.

As for the algorithms, well they were the secret sauce, the reason to stay in that garden. The USP. From Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, they took your simple elegant timeline and said, ‘Now, come on, you’re gonna miss the good stuff. Come on, we promise, we have such sights to show you….’

Just look at TikTok, a social media app where you don’t even need to follow anyone, because the algorithm will tell you what you want to see. Because they know what you want to see much better than you could determine for yourself, you fucking pleb. How dare you?

Except, we now know it’s something they’re incredibly shit at. I recently read a fascinating essay by Lauren Leek about how much the algorithms absolutely suck at making recommendations, because what every single one of them always does is revert to a homogenised baseline:

Imagine forty options, cuisines, genres, shop types, and a standard algorithm: predict what people want, show them more of it, watch what they pick, update. Then let the loop run.

The mode gets shown more, so it gets picked more, so the model grows more confident the mode is what people want, and the tails starve. Within a few dozen rounds, a catalogue that began almost perfectly even collapses onto one dominant option. But why does it collapse toward the mode rather than fan out across all that individual data?

Almost every recommender is trained to minimise a prediction error, get the rating wrong by as little as possible, or maximise the chance you click. But the problem is that under squared-error loss, the prediction that minimises your expected error is the conditional mean. So an algorithm that is uncertain about you, and it is always at least a little uncertain, hedges toward the average. The more uncertain it is, the harder it pulls you toward the crowd. This is why more data doesn’t save us. Personalisation under a standard loss function is regression to the collective mean with extra steps. Variance, the technical word for the stuff that makes you you, is expensive to predict. Basically, diversity is variance, and optimisers are built to minimise variance.

Take any place an algorithm is put, and you’ll find that it produces the same, greyed-out, slop-maxxed result. Every town with the same five restaurants. Pop songs that all sound the same, no more use of words like parsimonious, or pedantic, or perineum in lyrics. (Yes, I did give myself a challenge to invoke the smelly bridge twice in one blog post, what of it? You’re not gonna get that from an algorithmically optimised bit of writing, are you?)

But you can add another factor here: the job of any algorithm is not to show you something you’d like, or to delight you, or surprise you. Its job is to stop you from navigating away. Now, if it thinks it can do that by showing you delight, or surprise, then it will, but of course, it won’t do that. In most cases, it will work out what they all seem to work out; it gets you to stay glued to your screen by making you really fucking angry.

The clearest, earliest example of this is YouTube, where the rabbit hole phenomenon meant the algorithm determined that the best people from scrolling away was to show a more extreme version of what someone was already watching, leading to hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people across the globe being fed increasingly extreme political content. But, hey, it’s probably a coincidence that this model has since been replicated across hundreds of other companies, leading to a radical resurgence of a global far right, right?

I want a world without algorithms. Or, at least, ones created by major corporations for the express intent of keeping you locked into their ecosystem (and that’s the most generous reading of why they’re doing that). The concept of an algorithm is not, in itself, a bad thing, but as social media matures, and new tools emerge, we should be looking at smaller, more nuanced, personalised algorithms.

Allotments

So, what's the answer? Well, I can really only answer that for myself, because I'm the only person I feel empowered to speak for.

I want to build my own garden.

I’m not talking about an actual garden here, because I hate gardening. All those thorns, and bugs, and muck. Eww. No, I’m talking about a digital garden. Maybe a garden is too grand a word, actually. Actually, what I'm looking for is an allotment. A little space, all of my own. I can plant whatever the fuck I want. Except, you know, bad stuff. Because I'm a responsible kind of guy.

And, hey, mine can sit next to yours. And there’s Dan, one allotment over. Maybe don’t get him started on Marvel movies, though. We can move freely between each other’s spaces, without trampling on each other's cabbages. Look, I can show you what I’m growing, and you can show me yours.

No, not like that. Put that away.

I'm not saying we'll ever truly leave the megafarms behind, or that we’ll ever convince EVERYONE to join a co-op, but we can at least not be so reliant on them.

Now, I am but a simple fiction writer, one with no ability to code, nor money to invest in some glorious new technology, nor, frankly, the weight and authority to convince anyone of, well, anything. I'm just me. Now, if you want a nice trilogy about post-apocalyptic societal collapse in England, or maybe a rip-roaring tale of vampires and witches in modern York, I can sort you right out. But when it comes to this other stuff, I am an absolute layperson, albeit one with views. Ho, boy, do I have a lot of those.

Oh hey, I also have a blog, so now you have to hear them. Or not. I mean, nobody made you read down this far.

So, why am I writing about this stuff, given that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about on any kind of technical level? Well, I want to be involved in a revolution, somehow. I feel like the guy on the beach who spots the shark in the water first, but doesn't know what to do with the information, beyond waving my arms about a bit.

If we accept my premise that the seed of the problem with the internet is that we allowed everything to be fenced off into walled gardens controlled by morally repugnant billionaires hell-bent on destroying democracy, then we need to stop thinking about finding a different walled garden built by nice people and hoping that somehow that’ll all be okay. People ran to Bluesky and Threads from X because they were like ‘maybe these guys aren’t gonna be displaying Nazi signals into the sky like some kind of bastardised Jim Gordon’, when you’re still only looking at people who can afford really big lights.

Listen, not all of my analogies are great, okay?

If the problem is one of scale, what if the answer lies in the opposite? In us, as individuals? Now, let’s be clear, I am not talking here in a 'if we all just recycle our plastic and eat organic then maybe it'll rain again one day' sense, because that particular myth is a media framing narrative designed to excuse corporations and governments from any responsibility for addressing climate change.

The great sage of our times, Cory Doctorow (in an article advocating using RSS readers more, which I will come back to), addressed this very thing.

“No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren’t really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, “What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?”

It’s frustrating, but my general answer is, “Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something systemic.”

There’s very little you can do as a consumer. You’re not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar and digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can’t agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave for and so end up stuck there.”

He’s right, of course, but again, I think he’s missing the point, somewhat. Any movement is made of individuals, and together enough of us can move as a herd, changing the direction of travel in the opposite direction of what the Nerd Reich wants.

I believe the answer to scaling our way out of these walled gardens is already here, and it’s the decentralised internet. Specifically, the AT Protocol. But what I think is the best part of all this is that it doesn’t need gazillions in seed money, or the VC vultures to descend. What it needs is us. If the decentralised internet is how we reclaim the internet, to rewild it, then we all need to start to tend our own little part of it.

What we need are allotments, see?

What the Atmosphere allows us all to do is more effectively curate the online experience we want for ourselves. The key here is that because the data we create in an app no longer belongs to the app, it belongs to you. Now, that’s a bit of a mad abstract idea, but bear with me.

Take my Bluesky account (no, take it, please). I set that up when I fled Twitter, like, well, everyone on Bluesky. I like it; it kind of has the vibe of Old Twitter. Well, not really, but if you squint real hard. But what I like about it has very little to do with Bluesky itself; it's the people I follow there, the custom feeds, etc. But what worries me about it is the very 'tech bro' feel of the people who run it. They're not the worst, by any means, but there's... I dunno, a vibe?

Then I heard about Eurosky. Oh no, you're thinking. NOT ANOTHER ONE! But Eurosky is actually just a different place to host your data. Not just for Bluesky, but for all of The Atmosphere. The advantage? Well, it's in Europe, as the name suggests, so the content on my PDS, once moved, is protected by EU legislation. And if Bluesky is sold to Peter Thiel tomorrow so that he can start to try and count up all the dirty little migrants that make his skin itch, my data is no longer on their servers.
Except, don't I still need Bluesky? Well, no, actually, because Eurosky have launched Mu Social, which basically mirrors what Bluesky does. So if you follow me on Bluesky, and I post on Mu, my post appears in your feed, just like if I had posted from Bsky. And I get your posts in my feed. But I also get an edit button; my feed is green, and there’s a News tab that’s, well, got potential.

Neat, huh?

Another example is on this blog, right here. I am using Offprint, which you can think of as like Substack, but without the funding of the Far Right. Blogs, newsletters, you know the deal. Except Offprint uses a format that’s become a standard ‘lexicon’ in AT Protocol called Standard.Site, which is also used by several other blog platforms; Leaflet, or Pckt, for example. But everything I do on Offprint - my posts, my data, my subscribers, my likes, my reposts - actually lives on my PDS at Eurosky.

So, if the AT Protocol is the architecture of a new kind of social media, how does that look, in practice? Well, I’ve been redesigning my website of late, because, you know, I’m a fucking nerd who actually has a website in the year of our lord 2026. But it’s made me think about how I want to interact with the web, moving forward.

If we're going to go back to a world without these walled gardens and their algorithms, we need to remember how to share things again. We've been conditioned by Big Algo to think that we don't need to tell people what interests us, because that's the job of the algo, and besides, who cares what you think, puny human?

But I will always be more inclined to trust a human’s recommendation over a machine’s. Sure, a machine can say ‘Paul likes Birds in Row as a band so he will probably like the new Hammok album because other people who like Birds in Row like the new Hammok album’ but that’s not got the same weight as some guy in the crowd at 2000 Trees spotting a Birds in Row t-shirt and saying, somewhat drunkenly, ‘dude, did you fucking catch that Hammok set? Unreal, they just make me want to fucking shake my hips and cry and mosh all at the same time. That bit where the riff comes in on Gooning for Free was like a bomb going off in my loins. You have to check out the new album.’

Which, ahem, I definitely didn’t do to some poor guy at 2000 Trees, honest.

Anyway, I’ve tried to reorganise my approach to being on social media in this way, as being about talking about what I want to scream about from the rooftops, and I’ve decided to use my website at hollowstone.press as a way to showcase that approach.

(Fuck the) systems

So, here are some of the places on the Atmosphere that you can find me hanging out:

• Bluesky: Sure, it’s X, for lefties, or ‘the place where nobody can take a joke,’ but I have to say I’ve really enjoyed Bluesky these last few years. Sure, it could do with a more diverse group of people on there, and don’t let anyone tell you it recaptures all of that early Twitter juice, but there’s a hell of a lot more of it than you’ll find on X, The Everything App.

• Popfeed: You know Letterboxd? Well, it’s that, but also for TV and music, and you can even find book stuff there, too. In fact, you can hook it up to mirror your Letterboxd account, and it’ll pull through all your activity automatically, so you don’t even need to come off of the one social media ecosystem that still works. Then, when Netflix buys Letterboxd and you can suddenly only give the new J-Lo romcom five stars and trying to rate a movie on Apple automatically logs you out of the app, you can just mosey over to Popfeed and all your reviews will be there, waiting for you.

• Bookhive: As Popfeed is to Letterboxd, Bookhive is to Goodreads. I bloody hate Goodreads, so I’m now using this to track and log my reading habits.

• Teal: This hasn’t even been launched yet, but it’s already highly popular amongst ATProto nerds. It’s basically a music tracker, à la Last.fm, but one where, because you own the data yourself, you can play around with it to a much greater extent than you can with the basic Top Artists charts over there. Or, it will be, once it launches. For now, you just have a bunch of enterprising fuckers using the public data in interesting ways.

And here are some of the places that I can foresee being integral to my publishing business, moving forward:

• Semble: Like most writers, especially ones writing around the edges of political and societal issues, or science and technology, I try to read as widely as I can about a range of subjects. In the last few years I’ve gone back to an RSS reader again, but I recently discovered Semble, a collaborative space for mapping the web, connecting ideas, and building shared knowledge, built on the AT Protocol. I’ve been building a ‘garden’ there of links that are all connected, in my head at least, and it’s a great tool to keep all my research in one place, as well as articles about a wide range of subjects, from creativity to the creative industries, societal changes, politics, and, you know, all the stuff that makes you feel sad if you think about it too much.

• Offprint: As I mentioned, Offprint is now the home to my non-fiction writing. There are two spaces - this blog and a newsletter that’s purely focused on book news, etc. I’ve seen a fair bit of what the Offprint team (aka.dad) have in store for the future, and I think this is going to more than replace Substack as a destination for bloggers, writers, and other creatives. And if it’s not, and they decide to sell it to Peter Thiel so he can turn it into a place for his weird Satan fetish, then I just log out and log back into Leaflet, or Pckt, and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to my readers.

• Atmos: This is a pretty simple little event management tool, but unlike something like a Facebook event, which requires you to be both on Facebook and have a Facebook account to see it, this can be ported to anywhere you want, though you would need an Atmosphere account to RSVP. But the good news is, once you have one of them, you also have access to every other Atmosphere application.

• Byline: This is in its very early days, but it’s one I’m most excited about. Billing itself as both a public directory for independent books and an author-owned hub for books, buy links, events, live sessions, and conversations, this is a service that ticks a lot of the boxes that I mentioned back in my article Publishing is Fucked. The Atmosphere Could Save It. Built by authors, this feels like it has the potential, along with Bookhive, to become a mix of Bookbub, Goodreads, your local book club, and a lot more besides. I’m in the process of setting up my Author hub on there at the moment, so you won’t find much there yet, but watch this space.

Hollow Stone…Gardens?

Here’s where it becomes fun, I think. Because all of the data that you can see on all of these sites is my data, I can take it and do something fun with it. So, if you visit the Now page of Hollow Stone Press, you can see a proper snapshot of my brain, in all its glory. Okay, maybe not all of it.

First off, there’s a research and links section, which pulls directly from Semble so that you can see a real-time feed of the kind of articles that are shaping my fictional worlds.

Then there’s my Popfeed feed, where you can see what films I’ve been watching, what books I’ve been reading, and what albums I’ve been reviewing. This is going back to what I said before about remembering how to share things again.

Then, lastly, because I’m a massive music nerd, there’s all my music listening data from Teal, cut in a hundred different ways, so you can see what I’m listening to, how my music tastes have changed, what my favourite albums are, etc. Because music is magic.

Moving away from the Now page, you can click on my Events page, and you can see upcoming releases, book conferences, talks, etc, all hooked up through Atmos.rsvp, so you can see what’s coming up, at a glance. And if you visit my News page, that’s a feed of my newsletter posts on Offprint.

Now, this is all very early days, and as things stand, any integration with my shonky old wordpress website are through code blocks, but where I’d really like to get to is a proper, AT Protocol native website, where my book pages are callups of the raw Byline data, and will show ratings, reviews, and where people can leave comments under the books that then pull through to that book’s records. Or where people can interact with my events natively, all through a single Atmospheric login.

It’ll be my little garden.

We should all get one and build ourselves a better internet.