At @spritely we're building the future of decentralized networking tech (social networks and otherwise)!
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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!
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
But again, I just don't think decentralized social networks aiming to replicate web 2.0 are what we primarily need to meet the challenges ahead.
I worry about activism on such platforms today not being robust enough.
We need platforms which meet the needs of individuals, communities, activists.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Which starts to get into serious business territory when you throw "activism" and "human rights" out there but then on the other hand I'm showing you video game screenshots? What on earth is going on?
Well, aside from being great demos, I think we need fun and whimsy. It's gotten us this far.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
It's easy to forget that social networks have owed their success more than anything to people *enjoying being on them*.
I think sometimes people say "we need to focus on serious things" and it's easy to accidentally make the story sterile.
We aren't going to make it if we don't have a fun time.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
There's more to say, and I plan on taking a deep dive into our tech, piece by piece, over the days ahead. There's a lot to unpack!
But in the meanwhile, let's get back to the campaign. A call to action. The reason this thread is here.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I'm asking for your support, for you (yes you!) to help out @spritely, however you can.
We are a small nonprofit. We can't do this without your support.
Please help donate for the future of the internet. Thank you.
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puffball: Stands Defiantlyreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
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@cwebber I have been looking into #IPFS and #Iroh recently and, from the white paper I found on looking into Goblins, I came across references to IPFS, Tahoe-LAFS, ERIS, but couldn't figure if this P2P layer was already integrated somehow or if this is where Goblins is headed... It all sounds interesting but I haven't got my head around it yet.
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Matt Campbellreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber Will these browser-based applications ultimately use HTML for the UI, or will they run a new UI toolkit in a canvas like the video game demos? That's the one thing that makes me worry about the call for new foundations; the existing web platform is already pretty good for accessibility, in particular. Of course, there's a way to make canvas-based UI more or less accessible, by constructing a parallel DOM. But it's tricky.
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@matt @cwebber they will use your standard HTML elements. canvas just made sense for a sprite-based game. here's a blog post from last year where we show how to use some of the DOM API with Hoot https://spritely.institute/news/building-interactive-web-pages-with-guile-hoot.html
AAAAUGH YOU'RE SO COOL I LOVE YOU SPRITELY