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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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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/

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!

@spritely $87.3k

@spritely $87.7k omg it's nearly .5k in 5 minutes O_O

@bnut @cwebber

I second this.
The spec could also serve as a rough map to where we'd want to go :)

@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

https://spritely.institute/donate/

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/

Here's me holding the secret lore of MIT AI memos that I, and I alone, have at my house and which are not uploaded on the internet please donate to the Spritely Institute (donate ENOUGH and maybe I will seek to get them archived so everyone can read them) https://spritely.institute/donate/

"Christine this is really too much"

I appeal to you one final time, one last attempt to thirstpost to a Very Particular Kind of Person into donating to the Spritely Institute

Here is me holding an ORIGINAL COPY of Guy L. Steele's dissertation, RABBIT: A Compiler for SCHEME

Please donate to the Spritely Institute https://spritely.institute/donate/

Okay maybe the "let's outraise Free Our Feeds" wasn't my one and only shallow fundraising post I am not sorry

@cwebber Worked for me and a friend in last 10 minutes. Go go go

@simon_brooke @cwebber (got me, I donated)

@va2lam @simon_brooke

@va2lam @simon_brooke (thank you!)

@kkarhan I know I ask people to explain activitypub to me as a meme but wow did you have to reply-guy nearly every single post I made in this thread

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949681780481070
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949699892358019
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949702702413616
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949711716894488
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949717085109036
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949723311490161
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949729607593703
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949743479648289
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113949745211991013