Back

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!

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?!

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?

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!

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?!

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.

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!

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!

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/

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.

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.

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.

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*.

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.

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.

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.

@cwebber "SICP-hugging cat girls"

\fans self

@simon_brooke If I need to thirst-post with copies of SICP for the sake of the Spritely fundraiser to appeal to a certain type to donate I WILL DO IT

https://spritely.institute/donate/

Here is me holding a copy of The Little Prover please donate to the Spritely Institute https://spritely.institute/donate/

Here are MULTIPLE images of me holding Software Design for Flexibility please donate to the Spritely Institute https://spritely.institute/donate/

"Christine have you no sense of shame"

I do not here is me holding a copy of Paradigms of Aritificial Intelligence Programming please please donate to the Spritely Institute https://spritely.institute/donate/

Here's me holding the secret lore of MIT AI memos that I, and I alone, have at my house and which are not uploaded on the internet please donate to the Spritely Institute (donate ENOUGH and maybe I will seek to get them archived so everyone can read them) https://spritely.institute/donate/

"Christine this is really too much"

I appeal to you one final time, one last attempt to thirstpost to a Very Particular Kind of Person into donating to the Spritely Institute

Here is me holding an ORIGINAL COPY of Guy L. Steele's dissertation, RABBIT: A Compiler for SCHEME

Please donate to the Spritely Institute https://spritely.institute/donate/

Okay maybe the "let's outraise Free Our Feeds" wasn't my one and only shallow fundraising post I am not sorry