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For this #GivingTuesday I'm going to make the (biased) argument for why you might consider donating to @spritely, especially if you care about a healthier future for the internet! https://spritely.institute/donate/
Here's a little thread explaining more... 🧵
@spritely is developing some damn cool tech: Distributed programming! Leading the way on a secure P2P protocol (OCapN)! A WebAssembly toolkit!
But: is "cool tech" what matters? *Why* are we trying to make cool tech? What are the *social implications* of making this technology?
I gave a talk on this recently: "Protocols and Purpose in a Global Democratic Crisis" https://c-tube.c-base.org/w/f9pF5pwxX8mVkmW2i3dU1M
*None* of the decentralized social networks today are robust enough to handle the threats facing vulnerable people and activists today. Not the present-day fediverse, not Bluesky/ATProto. What can we do?
What can we do? Is there hope? Is it possible to build something better?
Spritely was born out of this work, and the strive to create infrastructure allowing for "Networks of Consent". More on that here: https://spui25.nl/programma/we-can-change-the-defaults-building-networks-of-consent-and-spaces-of-joy-in-the-ruins-of-social-media
@cwebber something ironic about clicking a link to an article on Networks of Consent and the first thing I see is a cookie popup 😅
@cwebber thank you! I look forward to watching that.
@cwebber no spoilers, I have this up on the TV now
I love computers. When people say "Computers were a mistake!" it makes me sad.
But it's had to blame people. The direction computers have gone in, the experience people largely have had, is a loss of agency and empowerment.
How do we bring that back, and do better than ever even?
@cwebber A good start would be differentiating between computers and the people who apply them.
For example, I like AI as a shorthand for a huge collection of tools, I'm not a fan of how a subset of AI tools are being used today in business and society.
@cwebber Build alternatives that prove our point, invite them to join, and ignore everyone else who otherwise denigrates or questions those alternatives.
ActivityPub is one of the key ways we can do that, thanks in part to you.
@cwebber the more I touch computers the more I hate them. The only way to fix them is to redo everything from scratch, but that is not possible to do properly because of capitalism, so the only way to fix computers is to remove capitalism, and well, good luck.
I am trying to at least make using computers not a painful experience, but like, redoing basically everything, including the CPU, is a PITA, and there is still the issue of dealing with things like the internet, which just, makes any kinda effort like this unable to succeed fully, not even taking the money into account.
I regularly want to just run off to the woods.
@cwebber break a few big corpos and some vc founds and tech will began to heal, nothing like actually depending on providing good software to get them to treat the users better
User-empowering technology is a lot of work, corporations aren't motivated to build it. We need research and development of new tech that changes the game from an org that isn't bound by pushing profit.
And that's why @spritely is a nonprofit research lab.
So... what are we doing?
We're building cool tech:
- Goblins, p2p distributed programming: https://spritely.institute/goblins/
- Hoot, a WebAssembly toolkit (and Scheme->WASM compiler) https://spritely.institute/hoot/
- OCapN, a secure distributed p2p networked protocol https://ocapn.org/
But... what are we *doing* with these things?
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