At @spritely we're building the future of decentralized networking tech (social networks and otherwise)!
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At @spritely we're building the future of decentralized networking tech (social networks and otherwise)! We just launched a supporter campaign and could really use your help! https://spritely.institute/donate/
I'm also going to talk about why Spritely is important & deserves your support! 🧵
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Before I get any further, I just want to say that the Spritely Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, your donations are tax-deductible in the US!
And we have a few different donor levels... some of them even let you get your name in video game credits! (More on that in a few!)
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Spritely is built by people who know and understand decentralized (social) networks and their strengths and weaknesses today very well: @tsyesika and I, two co-founders (and the first two working on Spritely's engineering) are both co-authors of the ActivityPub spec powering the fediverse!
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Unfortunately it's not feasible or easy to do everything we'd like in decentralized social networks today... not on the fediverse nor anywhere!
The vision of Spritely is "secure collaboration". Finding how to do it was a four-year research project before the Spritely Institute even launched!
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
It turns out there's a whole group of people who figured out how to do "secure collaboration" right: the object capability security folks! Spritely builds on their history!
Here's Electric Communities Habitat: P2P, secure 3d virtual worlds, player-run economies, safe untrusted execution. In 1997!
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Ultimately, Spritely is working towards user-facing software with secure-UI ideas applied to them. Here's a mockup!
But it's WAY TOO HARD to build this stuff right now. P2P tech shouldn't be the domain of super-ultra-experts.
With Spritely's new foundations, secure p2p tech is the *default*.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by [email protected]
Here's where the first piece of @spritely's tech comes in: Spritely Goblins!
Goblins is a capability-security-by-default distributed programming environment. It supports:
- p2p programming (by default!)
- a time traveling debugger
- a powerful serialization framework
- & much more! -
Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Goblins takes care of *so many* of the hard parts of distributed programming for you. It abstracts them, so you can focus on the program you want to build!
This is a big game changer. And it's the essential foundation for everything else we're doing.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Goblins is fully transactional. Remember when we said it supports "time travel"? Here's a terminal-based space shooter built on Goblins. As you can see, we can roll backwards and forwards in time!
*Not a single line of gameplay code was added* to support time travel, because Goblins supports it!
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Goblins is deeply integrated with its network protocol OCapN (the Object Capability Network).
CapN supports wild things like:
- distributed, efficient capabilty security
- sending messages to objects before they even exist (promise pipelining!)
- distributed garbage collection
- and much more! -
Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
OCapN is both old tech (it's based on CapTP from E, the same language the EC Habitat game used) and new; we're collaborating on making this a standard everyone can use at https://ocapn.org/
Goblins abstracts the network though. You usually never even need to think about it! Just do ordinary programming!
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
The other big piece of Spritely tech is Hoot, our Scheme-to-WebAssembly compiler. This helps us get our tech to everyone!
But Hoot is more than that! It's an all-around WASM toolkit!
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
The good news is that Hoot means that Spritely's programs are coming to the browser!
Hey, remember when I said you can get your name in Spritely's video game credits by donating?
You can go play a Goblins-based video game RIGHT NOW in your browser, thanks to Hoot! https://davexunit.itch.io/cirkoban
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professional box/furniture throwerreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber I absolutely adore goblins and am using it to implement a cool game system idea. I love the work that you and Spritely put into it! The IO update really helped me understand more about how player input can mingle with goblins.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Why all this? Why the video games? Why the weird low-level tech! Why not just focus on writing some new higher-level software?
LOTS of people are writing great high-level software right now! That's good. But right now we need new foundations.
We need to change the game.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
We need to change the game so that it's *easy* to run decentralized tech that doesn't just scale up, it scales down.
We need decentralized tech that's easy to build and reason about.
We need tech that's safe.
And we need tech that's cooperative.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I don't know about you, but there's a lot about the world today that worries me. I don't think building decentralized versions of Web 2.0 era social networks is going to get us there.
We need tech that's secure, that's robust.
We need tech that's *participatory*.
We need tech for you and me.
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flaeky pancakoreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber is there any plans to get spritely support into godot?
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
One of the things I'm most proud of about the fediverse is that it owes its success to a lot of queer people working on it. This lead to the fediverse being very queer itself. I'm proud of that.
Maybe it's weird to say, but that seems to be happening again with Spritely.
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@cwebber I read this thread and a bunch of other stuff you’ve posted here and on your website, and I still don’t quite get it. Is there any ELI5 version anywhere that you can point me to? I have a technical background, and I still can’t grok what it is you all are doing here. It sounds cool, which is why I keep trying to understand!
