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!

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.

Here is where I pivot to the ask.

I am asking YOU to support the Spritely Institute.

If you want to read up, do it! The information on what we're doing is laid out for everyone to see. There are papers on our homepage. Find out for yourself.

But I am asking YOU to support us.

@cwebber I am so excited!

We are a nonprofit research institute building open source tech and open protocols for the commons that CHANGE THE GAME on how the internet works.

An internet for you, for your friends and community, controlled by you and friends, without large corporate gatekeepers.

But we need your help.

"Spritely, brought to you by the people who brought you the fediverse!" We've done the research. Not to be smug but we ARE the experts.

We are telling you, decentralized social networks as they exist today are not enough.

And we are building the future.

Please help us! https://spritely.institute/donate/

And if that's not enough... if that's not enough! If the moral ask ALONE was not enough!

We show off our tech by making video games and if you donate at the silver, gold, or diamond levels YOU GET YOUR NAME IN OUR OPEN SOURCE VIDEO GAMES how cool is that? https://spritely.institute/donate/

In short:
- Horray the fediverse/ActivityPub is great
- Except literally the two people at the top of that spec are saying it's NOT ENOUGH and we have more to do
- Except THEY'RE BUILDING IT and so is the rest of their awesome team!!
- We need your help!
- Pls donate!
-
https://spritely.institute/donate/

@cwebber "SICP-hugging cat girls"

\fans self

Thank you! As I write this we have ONE HOUR LEFT of our campaign and we have raised OVER $85k!!!! https://spritely.institute/donate/

THANK YOU EVERYONE! And if you haven't supported @spritely yet please do so! And thank you to those who have!

@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

Support Spritely! — Spritely Institute

(spritely.institute)

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/