Building the Post-Platform Web

Why we must bypass the gatekeepers—and how we're building the alternative.

About a month ago—on October 3—Apple removed ICEBlock and similar apps from the App Store after pressure from the Trump administration. A lawful tool for communities vanished with a single corporate decision.

Roughly two weeks later—on October 20—AWS suffered a major outage that rippled across the internet, knocking thousands of sites and apps offline and reminding everyone how much of the web depends on one company’s cloud.

I began wondering:

• What if the internet didn’t hinge on a few clouds—so one provider’s outage couldn’t ripple across our lives?

• What if lawful apps couldn’t be quietly erased by an app store or platform policy?

• What if presence, messaging, and media moved without ads, trackers, data brokers, or algorithmic profiling?

• What if the people doing the work kept the power and the margin—instead of serving platforms that tax the relationship?

• What if the backbone of the digital world were our own devices—our collective computing power—instead of corporations that treat attention as inventory and privacy as a problem to solve?

• What if we could stop being just consumers of the internet, and instead, become the internet?

You’ll notice I haven’t posted since then.

I was tempted to just write about those questions. But instead, for the past month, I’ve been working about 12 hours a day to build the answer.

This project is a new and urgent priority, but it doesn’t mean the writing and analysis you subscribed for will stop. My plan is to find a new balance—to continue writing and analyzing while I’m also building.

Today I’m revealing ATS — AllTheServices. Not another platform, but a new layer. A layer that routes around the tyrants.

Left Device → Ping Sent | Right Device → Ping Received

The War They Declared and the Answer We’re Building

Let’s name the power structure we’re done obeying.

• Cloud oligopolies turned the public web into a private dependency. When they wobble, our lives stall.

• Platform gatekeepers sit between people and lawful software, erasing tools by policy whim.

• Gig-work empires brand your labor as theirs, own the customer relationship, and skim the margin.

• Ad-tech & data brokers insist your attention is inventory and your identity is product.

We didn’t pick this fight. We’re responding with ATS: a user-run relay layer that routes around cloud chokepoints, resists platform vetoes, refuses surveillance economics, and keeps value with the people who create it.

They centralize to control and extract. We decentralize to restore and protect.

How It Works (The Big Picture)

So how does it work without a central, corporate chokepoint?

1. It’s NOT an ‘App Store’ App. ATS is a Progressive Web App (PWA). You install it directly from the website. That’s it. There is no Apple or Google store that can approve it, and more importantly, no store that can yank it on a political whim.

2. It’s a Network of People, Not Platforms. Instead of relying on one company’s vulnerable cloud, ATS runs on a “relay layer”—a network of small servers. At first, I’m running them to prove the system. Soon, the software will be released so anyone can run one. The backbone becomes community-run by design, making it resilient. No single outage, and no single corporate decision, can take it offline.

3. Privacy is the Default, Not a ‘Feature’. The system is built to forget. It delivers your message and moves on. We don’t collect what we don’t need. No trackers. No data brokers. No ads. Period.

That’s the big picture. For those who want to see the blueprints, I’ve written a complete technical deep-dive on how the relay layer, key management, and privacy protocols work. You can read the whitepaper here.

The Roadmap

We move from momentary presence to full human connection—on the same rails.

1. Private messaging (Signal Protocol). From “where” to “say.”

2. Small, service-related media. Profiles, work samples, deliverables—stored via the network, not a monolith.

3. Direct Work Marketplace. People hire people directly; the network stays invisible.

4. Live audio/video. Real-time communication over the same relay mesh.

5. Streamed audio/video. Creator channels (music, podcasts, video) delivered over community-run relays—like Spotify/YouTube in function, but operated by people, not a single platform.

6. The Open Network. Opening the ATS relay layer as public infrastructure, allowing other developers to build their own resilient, private, platform-proof apps on the same rails.

Each step extends the same principle: cooperation over custody.

The Economics: Two Human Economies

When the marketplace goes live, the target is simple:

• ~95% of revenue stays with the people doing the work.

• ~5% funds the infrastructure—primarily paying relay operators.

That means two healthy, human economies: those who provide services, and those who keep the network running. No ad stack. No data brokerage. No venture capital leash.

This Isn’t a Black Market. This Is a Public Square.

Let’s be clear about what this is—and what it is not. This isn’t the “dark web,” and it’s not a crypto-token fantasy.

• Open web, not hidden services. ATS apps install as PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) straight from the public internet. No Tor, no .onion, no special browsers. It’s built for lawful, above-ground coordination in daylight.

• Accountable privacy, not impunity. We protect ordinary people from surveillance capitalism with built-in privacy—without creating a black-market sanctuary. Privacy is the default; abuse is not the goal.

• Real payments, no tokens. No coins, no tokenomics. We’re talking real dollars ($), processed via Stripe—not speculative crypto. When the Direct Work Marketplace goes live, the split is transparent and simple: ~95% to providers and ~5% to sustain the relays. Boring, auditable finance.

• User-run resilience, not secrecy theater. Decentralization here isn’t about evasion; it’s about eliminating chokepoints. As relay software is released and others run nodes, the backbone becomes civic—operated by many, captured by none.

We’ll Succeed When We “Disappear”

My vision for ATS’ success is strange to today’s platforms: our disappearance.

• When you think of your favorite language tutor or graphic designer—not of ATS.

• When you think of chatting with a family member or friend—not of ATS.

• When you can follow your favorite audio/video creator without fearing platform gatekeeping.

• When you keep a fair share of what you earn—paying only the fair cost of running the network.

We succeed when ATS feels less like a platform, and more like your dialer or your browser—the quiet rails beneath a free, human internet.

Try the Alpha (A Note on Our “Live Dev” Build)

You can try it right now and install the PWA:

A quick word of humility. To make this project transparent (and frankly, more fun), what you’re accessing isn’t a polished “build.” It’s literally my live development branch.

You’ll be seeing the app evolve in real-time as I build it. This means you’ll see different UI concepts, new ideas, and all the wins and the fails along the way. I intend to work hard to keep it stable, but let’s set realistic expectations: you will find bugs.

While it should be usable most of the time, please do not rely on it for anything critical yet. There will absolutely be times when I push new code and completely break the whole thing for a while. That’s all part of the journey, and I’m glad you’re here for it.

Once I finish tidying up the current code, I will launch a stable beta. Subsequently, as new features are added, I will sporadically update the beta with stable releases.

What You Can Do Today: From Community Defense to Everyday Life

That said, it already does exactly what the ICEBlock app set out to do—broadcast a location-based alert to a specific topic (like #ice_block)—but without any platform that can stop it.

This is a tool for community defense. It’s for organizers who need to coordinate safely. It’s for mutual aid networks who need reliable, private communication.

It’s also for everyday life, but the principle is the same:

• Find your car after a concert or game by dropping a pin on a topic like #wheres_my_car.

• Share a great food truck location with others nearby on a topic like #best_tacos.

• Found a lost pet? Ping its location to #lost_and_found in your area.

• Private location sharing with loved ones: This is key. Forget letting a corporation track your every move 24/7. Just create a random, unguessable topic (e.g., #12s94hf91), give it a friendly name, and share that topic only with your family. When you want to share your location, you send a single ping. They get the alert on their map. That’s it. It’s peace of mind, on your terms, without the surveillance.

I’d love to hear the use cases you invent—reply and tell me what you try.

Become the Internet: Our Pledge and Your Call to Action

For too long, we’ve been conditioned to accept dependency and call it progress: clouds that wobble and take our tools with them; platforms that treat lawful software as a privilege to grant or revoke.

ATS is a different bet. It’s a bet that we can stop being passive consumers of an internet owned by others, and instead, use the devices we already own to become the internet—a resilient, private, and humane backbone, run by and for ordinary people.

Today, it’s a topic-based ping that works. Next, it’s messages, media, work, and live conversation—without a platform in the middle.

But to build this new layer, we must be independent. We cannot replace one set of gatekeepers with another. That is my pledge to you:

• No ads. No data brokerage. No crypto carnival.

• Minimal data, maximal agency.

• Open-web distribution (PWA), platform-proof by default.

• Relays anyone can run; compensation that rewards reliability, not rent-seeking.

This pledge is the foundation of our mission. This isn’t just an idea. It’s a mission I’ve been pouring my life into. The work I’ve put in just since October has already resulted in more than 100,000 lines of code. The core is already built and functional.

I’ve put in the work to prove it’s real. If you believe in this mission, you can be part of building it. Here are the best ways to support the project right now:

1. Subscribe to this Substack (Paid or Free). This is the most direct way to get involved. Paid subscriptions directly fund development and keep this project independent. Free subscribers are just as vital—you’ll join the “insider” list for updates, stable beta releases, and news about future crowdfunding options.

2. Share this Project. The best way for this to grow is by word of mouth. If you know developers, activists, creators, or anyone tired of the status quo, send them this article.

3. Leave a Comment. This is a live-dev project being built in public. Your feedback, ideas, bug reports, and potential use cases are invaluable and will help shape the roadmap. Join the conversation below.

This is the first pulse of a post-platform web.

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P.S.: I am also actively exploring dedicated crowdfunding options to scale up development and fund the roadmap. Becoming a subscriber—paid or free—is the best way to ensure you’re the first to know when that goes live.