Join us as we write about what it would be a like to make these fictions become reality. Let’s make the web feel local and multi-player again. Let’s LAN the internet again.

Completely private common spaces often allow users to put whatever and allow people can construct their own digital nooks and cozy spaces.

These local networks will allow much more home-cooked and casual software to emerge. More people willing to run websites, servers, and fun-apps from old laptops and phones

This is different in that LAN here does not necessarily mean closely geolocated, but rather close in social and trust space.

A safe small space of people we trust, where we can coexist away from the prying eyes of the multi-billion-person internet.

Writing a web service for use by your friends should not be a form of combat, where you spend your days worrying about XSS attacks or buffer overflows. You should be focused on creating something new and wonderful in a place without bad people hounding you.

a tiny

It is not enough for some engineers to fully design a protocol to try to solve all of this, but rather to make it possible for the average layperson to be able to change and adapt software for their own needs. To make software not like a professional chef, but a home cook Cozy software cozy eternal beta test mode re: digital mindfulness! Not everything needs to be built at scale -- sometimes it can just... 12/13/2022 .

Unfortunately the way the web is designed, it makes it pretty difficult to do all the collaborative software I dreamed would be possible when I was a kid.

When I look at the web today, it feels like an abandoned mall. All I see are the echoes and ephemeral traces of strangers and friends, occasionally bumping into someone as they type a message in response to a post.

Magic.

just as easily as a piece of local state.

to

I cried because in the last week before winter break, some random person joined and completely blew up the server with TNT and we didn’t know backups were a thing.

Sometimes, I would get up at 2am and sneak downstairs to my laptop to figure out which cool new plugins and mods we could add and combine without completely crashing the game. I sneaked because I was only allowed 45 minutes of computer time after school.

It’s challenging to have people produce content for their neighbors instead of a wide general audience. It’s much more personal.

hile we care about enabling non-programmers, and have made some design decisions with them in mind, our current prototype does expect the user to have basic knowledge of JavaScript, and our test users have mostly been skilled programmers. We’re also not yet sure exactly where the limits of this model are—what kinds of apps are possible and desirable to build in this style?

We need reminders of wonder. In a 1994 interview, Fred Rogers, better known as Mr. Rogers, noted “I'm very concerned that our society is much more interested in information, than wonder.” 

While companies like SHEIN and ZARA are known for the tight vertical integration that enables real-time, demand-aware manufacturing, API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.

As I tried to understand how “culture” is transmitted, I came to understand that in order to be a part of a culture, you have to learn to participate in these elements. That’s how a culture becomes part of your identity: you learn to use the language, you read the community lore online, you post photos with the same aesthetic, and you know you’re “fitting in” when you start to get reblogs. And naturally, you buy objects too. By the end of this journey towards “fitting in,” you can tell your own story of membership and identity in the community (Wenger & Lave, 1991). Yet it is also clear that a crucial element of participation is practice. You can cut your hair like a skater and dress like a skater, but if you can’t do an ollie you’re not a skater. You can buy testosterone enhancer and maca root powder, but if you don’t post your gains, are you really a bodybuilder? Subcultures have these practices, participatory elements that I call “central” to what they are.

When legibility is forced upon people, it only serves to widen the gulf that already exists in society and disproportionately impacts marginalized groups2.

But those rules are also the strategies by which people manage to build lives here, carving out love and home and comfort in a place that does not seem suited for any of them. One of those rules is that an apartment, or even just a room in one, is a house if you insist that it is.

Ten mil­lion boards gives us a max­i­mum disk space require­ment of 22.17 gigabytes, eas­ily stored on a com­mod­ity hard drive or a cheap-enough cloud volume. A capa­ble com­puter could even hold that in RAM. Turns out, when you don’t store every user’s entire history, plus a record of every adver­tise­ment they’ve ever seen, your data­base can stay pretty slim!

You might update your board twice an hour or twice a month; you might amend one sen­tence or reboot the whole thing. Pub­lish­ing a new ver­sion is instantaneous, as easy as tap­ping a button. You don’t have to man­age a server to pub­lish a board; you don’t even have to estab­lish an account on a server.

With a universal API, each composition between each tool increases the total possible compositions and workflows by n∗(n−1)n * (n-1)n∗(n−1), all without developers needing to write the transformations between each one.

easy for people to switch between platform providers as one can switch between internet providers today.

we get modular interoperable local-first software Local-first software By centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts... Updated 6/1/2022 2 which we can stack to a global scale.

functionality of these apps without much difficult

Therefore, I believe that decentralized Web applications should exclusively use declarative queries to view and update data on our pods, so their expression of the intended data operation remains constant—even if interfaces are different. Rather than directly interacting with pod interfaces, queries are processed by a client-side library, which translates these queries into concrete HTTP requests against one or multiple data pods. This means that, rather than a horizontal interface orientation or a vertical interface that directly accesses the Web API, decentralized Web applications need a vertical interface orientation with an internal horizontal separation.

The current generation of Web applications communicates with servers through a highly specific sequence of steps that are hard-coded into the application logic. These steps contain specific requests to a Web API, a (typically custom) interface exposed by the server. This approach results in a highly specific contract between a client and a server—which is problematic on a decentralized Web, where data can actually reside in different data pods with possibly different interfaces. It is unrealistic to hope that all data pods will have the same Web API (be it Linked Data Platform, SPARQL, or GraphQL). Not only would this require a standardization effort without precedent, such a standard could never cover all cases. Given that we aim for competition on the data market as well, different kinds of data pods are expected to provide different kinds of interfaces with varying expressivity. On top of this, on a decentralized Web, the data needed by applications will be scattered across multiple data pods. So even if all pods had the same interface, apps would still need to route requests to the right pods and combine their data.

Indeed, we can regard a fully decentralized approach as a way to realize platform neutrality, where applications and storage solutions become interchangeable, just like websites and Internet providers.

Importantly, this disentanglement of data and services creates separate markets for data and applications. Each of those to markets comes with its own competitive forces that stimulate creativity and innovation at a higher rate, since the ability to provide a service no longer depends on collecting data.

However, soon after I published the piece, I noticed more and more founders and investors on Twitter announcing their own new spatial software apps. The term itself received more attention than any of the ideas in the piece, and notably, many of the spatial products being announced were not what I considered spatial software at all, despite my inclusion of clear definitions and descriptions in the original essay. The term took on a life of its own and became the object of mimetic competition between many participants in the Startup Twitter timeline.

On tech Twitter, we see people peddling narratives like the future of communities, the creator economy, tools for thought, and the no-code "movement." Oftentimes, these people are simply performing land grabs of their own, hoping to claim more and more territory within the narrative they deem powerful.