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!

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!

@[email protected] one place that federation would shine is specifically in regards to git. I’m glad that forgejo is working on federation. It is so stupid to have to make an account on all of these different projects. I understand why we have abandoned centralization like GitHub and the main gitlab instance… but with that came a cost of convenience. It’s hard to encourage people to make an account on something like https://activitypub.software/ (the gitlab instance hosting sharkey the software I am a developer/contributor to). People may want to just comment once or make a single issue and when that’s the case it’s kind of redundant to have all of these accounts. Hell, I have an account for akkoma’s forgejo instance because of one issue.

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.

@[email protected] Something that irks me a lot is the lack of discovery. See, mainline DHT allows for trackerless torrents. You can discover other peers through it. So, why on earth then are hashtags the way they are. I'm not sure mainline DHT is the answer to hashtags (though, entirely unrelated I thought the did:dht work was SUPER cool) this is more pointing out something that seemed impossible is very much possible. Hashtags are dependent on what an instance software has received (or rather, has been made aware of as well because most software supports fetching objects given a link). This is useless to small instances. If the entire point of me following a hashtag is to find related content I haven’t seen before and I’m on an instance with 20 or so users… unless I join a shit ton of relays I’m not going to get much populating those tags. Even this instance struggles and it has a lot of connections. I still find hashtags that I see people commonly use, I click on it and it’s just a desert. Fedi lacks when it comes to establishing new connections outside of your "bubble"/"orbit"/whatever you want to call it. On tumblr? I would click the tags and find tons of new content and people I want to follow.

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.

@[email protected] I’m not so sure there is a technical problem holding us back on this front. I think it’s entirely feasible to reconsider how hashtags function (and I’m well aware they aren’t necessarily defined by AP). Even our "social media" aspects are lacking. Sure, we have the appearance of your average social media site but it’s the Homer Simpson scene with the clothes pins. There’s a lot of things that have been brushed aside that makes this place feel off. It’s hard to ignore them when I have personal experience watching instance users struggle to find people to follow, dropping this platform entirely because discoverability is a nightmare. Someone with no followers can’t just go and ask "hey, I want to follow people who post cat pictures" because there’s no one there to talk to them. The very few times we do see this it was by chance that they were seen on local timeline.

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.

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.