Ancestors

Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:00

With TWO HOURS TO GO left on Spritely's supporter drive I am gonna give a LIVE THREAD about why you should support @spritely and why I am SO PROUD OF THE WORK WE ARE DOING HERE! https://spritely.institute/donate/

Let's gooooooo!!!! 🧵

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:03

Okay! So you know how you love decentralized social media? I mean presumably you do otherwise why would you ever read anything I write

Well the first two engineers on Spritely are also the two editors at the top of the ActivityPub spec (myself and Jessica Tallon) and this is no coincidence!

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:05

ActivityPub is great! It's the most popular decentralized social networking web based protocol in the world!

(Sorry, no, ATProto still isn't decentralized yet so we still have that claim to fame)

Tens of thousands of servers! Many, many federating implementations! Millions of users!

Are we done?!

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:07

No! There's a lot more work to do! The present day federated social web is not enough! Today's ActivityPub is not enough! ATProto is not enough!

None of this stuff is enough!

Spritely started from one question: What can't the present-day fediverse do? What's next?

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:11

Some obvious things the fediverse needs to do:

Content and accounts surviving when nodes go down (ATProto tries to address this, but I don't think quite does so right)!

Self-hosting is a pain! More peer-to-peer!

More secure! More private!

Healthier communities!

Less spam and abuse!

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:12

But really, the BIGGEST thing missing to me about the present-day fediverse: it's incredibly short sighted in its ambitions.

Why have we carved out "social media" as this particular kind of facebook/youtube/web 2.0 company defined thing?

Why shouldn't ALL software be social?!

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:14

All software should be able to be social, peer-to-peer, secure over the network. This becomes clearer when you see that it's hard to convince people to use Libreoffice once Google Docs exists.

Secure collaboration is important.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:15

It shouldn't be that writing secure, peer-to-peer applications is an exceptional thing.

Secure, peer-to-peer tech should be the DEFAULT THING you get when you write software, not the domain of experts.

Too ambitious? No! This requires some rethinking about how we write software!

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:18

If you remember when Django and Rails hit the scene, they were revolutionary. Not only did they make writing Web 2.0 applications easy, they made it so that you learned how to think like a Web 2.0 developer.

Spritely's work is akin to that, but for secure, collaborative, decentralized tech!

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:21

We're getting there. It's taken years, but we've got three big things that are putting the pieces in place:

Goblins, our p2p programming environment! https://spritely.institute/goblins/

OCapN, our p2p programming protocol! https://ocapn.org/

Hoot, bringing Spritely to browsers! https://spritely.institute/hoot/

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:23

There's a lot more I could say, there's a lot more I have said in other places. I believe Spritely is the future. I know it's a lot to take in. ActivityPub was a lot to take in, once upon a time.

If you want to dive in, it's all there. All out there to read. We've got tons of information these days. Yes, I know it's a lot to absorb.

If you don't want to dive in, it's a leap of faith. Let me help you make it.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:26

The future becomes the present when it hits peoples' hands. They start to assume of course, it was an inevitability.

Once Mastodon became a success, the popular response to ActivityPub switched from "I don't believe that could work" to "ActivityPub is obvious, anyone could have done it".

HN reply-guys always gonna armchair philosophize, act like they know everything once it's in front of their faces.

Well let me tell YOU what I think.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:28

ActivityPub has been a big success. The fediverse as it exists has been a big success. I'm proud of that work.

But personally, I think retrospectively, it'll be a footnote in history compared to what we're doing now.

Yes, I really do believe the jump is that large.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:30

The world is becoming far, far more dangerous of a place to be.

If human rights are going to survive, we're going to need better ways to not only communicate, but to collaborate. To do. To act.

We need stronger foundations than we have today. Stronger by a long shot.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:32

I worry about the future of activism if it needs to happen on ATProto, on the fediverse, as they exist today.

Especially* on ATProto, a system whose primary design point is "publicly index all content"; hardly safe for the current political environment. But the fediverse isn't much better.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:34

But this also misses the point.

"Social", as perceived in "social networks", misses a lot of what "social" means to me. A lot of what I thought and assumed "social" meant when we were standardizing ActivityPub, anyway.

A society doesn't just send postcards to each other. It does things together.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:35

All this research, all the work the Spritely Institute, it may seem like it's been low level, a bunch of computer science nerdery, the kinda stuff you'd expect out of a bunch of SICP-hugging catgirls.

Well, okay, it is. But it's not ONLY that.

And it's that way for a purpose.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:38

This next year, you're going to start to see the first pieces that start to hit users' hands.

Very technical users for the most part mind you, but more users' hands.

We're breaking out of "core foundations" mode. 2025 is the year you'll start to see people turn heads about Spritely, I think.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:39

Here is where I pivot to the ask.

I am asking YOU to support the Spritely Institute.

If you want to read up, do it! The information on what we're doing is laid out for everyone to see. There are papers on our homepage. Find out for yourself.

But I am asking YOU to support us.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:40

We are a nonprofit research institute building open source tech and open protocols for the commons that CHANGE THE GAME on how the internet works.

An internet for you, for your friends and community, controlled by you and friends, without large corporate gatekeepers.

But we need your help.

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:42

"Spritely, brought to you by the people who brought you the fediverse!" We've done the research. Not to be smug but we ARE the experts.

We are telling you, decentralized social networks as they exist today are not enough.

And we are building the future.

Please help us! https://spritely.institute/donate/

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Written by Christine Lemmer-Webber on 2025-02-04 at 22:45

And if that's not enough... if that's not enough! If the moral ask ALONE was not enough!

We show off our tech by making video games and if you donate at the silver, gold, or diamond levels YOU GET YOUR NAME IN OUR OPEN SOURCE VIDEO GAMES how cool is that? https://spritely.institute/donate/

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