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Many new people are discovering us since the launch of our supporter campaign (thanks to all who have supported us so far!) spritely.institute/donate/

For the next few days we're going to go through each of our Technical Values and Design Goals. spritely.institute/about/

Today's is "Secure collaboration". Let's talk about what that means to us!

The Spritely Institute

Our About page defines "secure collaboration" as:

> *Secure collaboration:* Spritely's work is to enable safe cooperation between individuals and communities in an unsafe world. We are building tools to make this possible.

This includes decentralized social networks. But that's just a start!

People collaborate in many different ways; one way is in communication and discourse. But we also want to build the worlds we want to live in together.

Why should we have only certain categories of software which are considered "social"? Our day to day lives involve social collaboration!

The goal of Spritely's tech is to allow *all* software to be able to be easily social and distributed. This requires new foundational work.

Tomorrow we'll talk about the high level conceptual model for secure collaboration we use in Spritely's technology.

Talk to you then, and thanks to everyone who's supported us so far! 💜 spritely.institute/donate

spritely.instituteSupport Spritely! — Spritely Institute

@spritely Not to be a naysayer, because I may be excited for some things your thing eventually brings to life, but, as a rather technical person, I have no idea what your thing is actually trying to do. I like to support cool initiatives, but I can't know if I agree or don't agree with your view of the future of the Internet, if I don't materially understand what it entails.

Imho you might be able to reach a few more folks in general if you make your messaging less buzzwordy.

@outfrost @spritely Well, that's the first time our work has been described as too buzzword'y... usually it's described as too technically complex, if anything. :) And I think the reason for that is probably that this is the first time we're describing our organization in a very non-technical level: talking about the values that grow out of the mission of the organization.

If you're wondering what we're doing, I'll explain it simply: building the foundations for the next generation of net tech

@outfrost @spritely The challenge is "what are those new layers", and we actually have a *lot* of information on that at lower levels of detail. Since you describe yourself as technical, this paper might be helpful to you: files.spritely.institute/paper

files.spritely.instituteThe Heart of Spritely: Distributed Objects and Capability Security

@cwebber @spritely I'm wondering about the tl;dr of "what" (more than the "why"), so I know whether I want to look something up in the long doc. Is Spritely an object capability permission model to be integrated by an operating system kernel, and to begin porting all applications to? Is it an interface for a new user-level application runtime? Is the decentralised object thing a separate framework, or part of the same, and is that important?

@cwebber @spritely Or is the whole point "we're here to figure out the tech to answer our current unmet needs, and we're not yet sure what all that tech is going to be"? Because reading the posts I'm not sure how to interpret it.

@outfrost @spritely We know what the tech is going to be. We have a roadmap, and the roadmap is what we're getting onto the website next. You can see an older version on the older website spritelyproject.org/

If you read the document I sent before, it's very specific about what the tech is to meet said needs. If you want another doc about motivation, read OCapPub: gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/bl

spritelyproject.orgSpritely

@outfrost @spritely However, it's very hard to explain these things sometimes by pointing at tech documents. It was incredibly hard to explain to people what ActivityPub was and why we were standardizing it when we were working on the standardization process. Once it gained major adoption, people "just got it"

More on that: dustycloud.org/blog/if-you-can

We have a lot of documentation and demos on our site. We'll be producing more high-level materials soon. I guess, how far do you *want* to dive?

dustycloud.orgIf you can't tell people anything, can you show them? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

@cwebber @spritely Tech documents is exactly what I wanted to avoid. I was looking for the "imagine social media but it's many websites/services that talk to each other, and anyone can host their own and connect it to the whole network" of ActivityPub, but for Spritely.

@outfrost @spritely Good feedback, thanks. More of the "features" from the old website have slowly been migrating onto the new one. It's good to hear that the things on the old website were very directly helpful in terms of what you felt you needed to see. Thank you!

@outfrost @spritely You may appreciate today's value writeup, which begins to expand on the things you're asking about: social.coop/@spritely/11370337

@cwebber @outfrost @spritely I have watched a few of your videos and one of @dthompson. I think that I have a very basic grasp of the technology but from what I understand I think it is fantastic, unfortunately the main spritely website does not communicate clearly the implications of the research for a regular user, so I have to agree with the buzzword comment. Maybe a paragraph about decentralization from an user's perspective would be a useful introduction.

@mirkoh @cwebber @outfrost @dthompson Thank you, we're working on it! The new website redesign is very fresh and we we have more planned on our messaging soon!

@cwebber @spritely Thank you, the older website tells me what the project's work is in more tangible terms. Seeing short descriptions (especially with examples) of specific pieces of software meant to be interfaced with helps a lot to contextualise how your work will advance the social goals, and what it could facilitate. This is crucial in understanding what something does (or is meant to do), before the deep, low-level details of how it does it, or scientific proof why it's a good idea.