Christine Lemmer-Webber
At @spritely we're building the future of decentralized networking tech (social networks and otherwise)! We just launched a supporter campaign and could really use your help! https://spritely.institute/donate/
I'm also going to talk about why Spritely is important & deserves your support! 🧵
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Before I get any further, I just want to say that the Spritely Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, your donations are tax-deductible in the US!
And we have a few different donor levels... some of them even let you get your name in video game credits! (More on that in a few!)
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Spritely is built by people who know and understand decentralized (social) networks and their strengths and weaknesses today very well: @tsyesika and I, two co-founders (and the first two working on Spritely's engineering) are both co-authors of the ActivityPub spec powering the fediverse!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Unfortunately it's not feasible or easy to do everything we'd like in decentralized social networks today... not on the fediverse nor anywhere!
The vision of Spritely is "secure collaboration". Finding how to do it was a four-year research project before the Spritely Institute even launched!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
It turns out there's a whole group of people who figured out how to do "secure collaboration" right: the object capability security folks! Spritely builds on their history!
Here's Electric Communities Habitat: P2P, secure 3d virtual worlds, player-run economies, safe untrusted execution. In 1997!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Ultimately, Spritely is working towards user-facing software with secure-UI ideas applied to them. Here's a mockup!
But it's WAY TOO HARD to build this stuff right now. P2P tech shouldn't be the domain of super-ultra-experts.
With Spritely's new foundations, secure p2p tech is the *default*.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Here's where the first piece of @spritely's tech comes in: Spritely Goblins!
Goblins is a capability-security-by-default distributed programming environment. It supports:
- p2p programming (by default!)
- a time traveling debugger
- a powerful serialization framework
- & much more!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Goblins takes care of *so many* of the hard parts of distributed programming for you. It abstracts them, so you can focus on the program you want to build!
This is a big game changer. And it's the essential foundation for everything else we're doing.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Goblins is fully transactional. Remember when we said it supports "time travel"? Here's a terminal-based space shooter built on Goblins. As you can see, we can roll backwards and forwards in time!
*Not a single line of gameplay code was added* to support time travel, because Goblins supports it!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Goblins is deeply integrated with its network protocol OCapN (the Object Capability Network).
CapN supports wild things like:
- distributed, efficient capabilty security
- sending messages to objects before they even exist (promise pipelining!)
- distributed garbage collection
- and much more!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
OCapN is both old tech (it's based on CapTP from E, the same language the EC Habitat game used) and new; we're collaborating on making this a standard everyone can use at https://ocapn.org/
Goblins abstracts the network though. You usually never even need to think about it! Just do ordinary programming!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
The other big piece of Spritely tech is Hoot, our Scheme-to-WebAssembly compiler. This helps us get our tech to everyone!
But Hoot is more than that! It's an all-around WASM toolkit!
Christine Lemmer-Webber
The good news is that Hoot means that Spritely's programs are coming to the browser!
Hey, remember when I said you can get your name in Spritely's video game credits by donating?
You can go play a Goblins-based video game RIGHT NOW in your browser, thanks to Hoot! https://davexunit.itch.io/cirkoban
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Why all this? Why the video games? Why the weird low-level tech! Why not just focus on writing some new higher-level software?
LOTS of people are writing great high-level software right now! That's good. But right now we need new foundations.
We need to change the game.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
We need to change the game so that it's *easy* to run decentralized tech that doesn't just scale up, it scales down.
We need decentralized tech that's easy to build and reason about.
We need tech that's safe.
And we need tech that's cooperative.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
I don't know about you, but there's a lot about the world today that worries me. I don't think building decentralized versions of Web 2.0 era social networks is going to get us there.
We need tech that's secure, that's robust.
We need tech that's *participatory*.
We need tech for you and me.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
One of the things I'm most proud of about the fediverse is that it owes its success to a lot of queer people working on it. This lead to the fediverse being very queer itself. I'm proud of that.
Maybe it's weird to say, but that seems to be happening again with Spritely.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
But again, I just don't think decentralized social networks aiming to replicate web 2.0 are what we primarily need to meet the challenges ahead.
I worry about activism on such platforms today not being robust enough.
We need platforms which meet the needs of individuals, communities, activists.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Which starts to get into serious business territory when you throw "activism" and "human rights" out there but then on the other hand I'm showing you video game screenshots? What on earth is going on?
Well, aside from being great demos, I think we need fun and whimsy. It's gotten us this far.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
It's easy to forget that social networks have owed their success more than anything to people *enjoying being on them*.
I think sometimes people say "we need to focus on serious things" and it's easy to accidentally make the story sterile.
We aren't going to make it if we don't have a fun time.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
I'm asking for your support, for you (yes you!) to help out @spritely, however you can.
We are a small nonprofit. We can't do this without your support.
Please help donate for the future of the internet. Thank you. 💜
Christine Lemmer-Webber
There's more to say, and I plan on taking a deep dive into our tech, piece by piece, over the days ahead. There's a lot to unpack!
But in the meanwhile, let's get back to the campaign. A call to action. The reason this thread is here.
dave
@matt @cwebber they will use your standard HTML elements. canvas just made sense for a sprite-based game. here's a blog post from last year where we show how to use some of the DOM API with Hoot https://spritely.institute/news/building-interactive-web-pages-with-guile-hoot.html
Matt Campbell
@cwebber Will these browser-based applications ultimately use HTML for the UI, or will they run a new UI toolkit in a canvas like the video game demos? That's the one thing that makes me worry about the call for new foundations; the existing web platform is already pretty good for accessibility, in particular. Of course, there's a way to make canvas-based UI more or less accessible, by constructing a parallel DOM. But it's tricky.
dave
@what @cwebber let me know if this helps: we're trying to do for p2p, decentralized apps what things like rails and django did for web 2.0 apps. that is: we want to give you a technology stack that lets you focus on the business logic of your app and have the output be both secure and decentralized.
Girl?
@cwebber I read this thread and a bunch of other stuff you’ve posted here and on your website, and I still don’t quite get it. Is there any ELI5 version anywhere that you can point me to? I have a technical background, and I still can’t grok what it is you all are doing here. It sounds cool, which is why I keep trying to understand!
Eamon
@cwebber this is the second time I've seen you express this "tech that doesn't just scale up, it scales down" idea (the first was in your megathread about Bluesky), and I just wanna say that it is such a catchy slogan that really gets at the heart of what we need. Thanks for doing all this brilliant work!
puffball: Stands Defiantly
@cwebber @spritely :akko_hatbite: AAAAUGH YOU'RE SO COOL I LOVE YOU SPRITELY
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Philip Bernhart
@cwebber And people normally run whimsical things on "serious" stuff. One needs not to forget that Smalltalk, the inspiration for modern desktops, GUIs, IDEs had exactly that kind of "silliness" when the people back then where thinking about how children could use these things to create programs.
This playfulness is something which is lacking currently in "frameworks", libraries, etc. all very boring strictly typed nonsense where no REPL can be found.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@eamon 💜
flaeky pancako
@cwebber is there any plans to get spritely support into godot?
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@fleeky my pun reply regarding "Is Spritely support coming to Godot?":
"I wouldn't wait on it"
Mandatory joke aside, it would probably pretty challenging to integrate Spritely's tech and Godot. OCapN perhaps could be, but it would have to be implemented particularly for it.
I would love to see Guile generally supported in Godot though!
professional box/furniture thrower
@cwebber I absolutely adore goblins and am using it to implement a cool game system idea. I love the work that you and Spritely put into it! The IO update really helped me understand more about how player input can mingle with goblins.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@ofeeg yay! :)
dave
@ramin_hal9001 @fleeky @cwebber hehe yeah... Chickadee aims to be more like a Love2D than a Godot. Much more modest in ambition and more doable as a small volunteer project. If you prefer code to a visual editor it might be nice one day ☺️
Ramin Honary
@fleeky someone is working on their own Godot-like game programming system: “Chicakdee“ by @dthompson .
Although it will probably be a while before Chickadee has those beautiful and easy-to-use scene editors that Godot has. It could get done faster if more people start contributing to the project.
Steve Herrick
@cwebber I'm glad to hear you say we need tech that's cooperative. I agree in the broad sense, but I also agree in the specific sense that I think Mastodon servers could be adapted to serve as the "platform" in platform co-ops. I have some early thoughts on ActivityPub extensions that could operate the business logic. There's a lot to learn along the way, but it seems very promising. I'd be curious to know if anyone else out there has similar thoughts.
dave
@serapath @what @cwebber @dat_ecosystem I am looking at the docs and it appears to be blockchain based, or at least uses something similar? is that correct? specifically looking at hypercore as it appears to be the central component https://docs.pears.com/building-blocks/hypercore
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
I can highly recommend taking a look at the pear runtime. If you are familiar with nodejs javascript, all it takes is:
`npm install pear -g`
and then
`pear run pear://runtime`
to get started. Just follow instructions.
This runtime is part of the @dat_ecosystem and JS was choosen to exactly provide an easy way for anyone to get started with p2p.
an example cross platform app is https://keet.io
runtime docs are here https://docs.pears.com
have fun 🙂
dave
@dat_ecosystem @serapath @what @cwebber thanks for clarifying. is it correct though that hypercore is the foundational piece here? I see "append-only log" and "signed merkle tree" in the project readme.
dat ecosystem
@dthompson @serapath @what @cwebber
dat started in 2013 and is a 501c3 public good organisation. the initial dat grew into a protocol, then into a project, then into a foundation hosting multiple projecys, into an ecosystem of projects with the dat a.k.a hyper stack having its own peer to peer runtime, much closer to the original nodejs vision of the early days.
The dat stack or hyper-stack including hypercore is open source and does not and will never use any blockchain.
dave
@serapath @what @cwebber @dat_ecosystem also I tried to look into keet but I can't find the source code. is it proprietary?
dave
@serapath @dat_ecosystem @what @cwebber I found this tutorial which was helpful for understanding things a little better. https://docs.pears.com/guides/making-a-pear-desktop-app
I see that networking uses dht: hyperswarm -> hyperdht -> dht-rpc
what's the serialization format for messages (peer.write in the tutorial)? is it json?
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
@dthompson @dat_ecosystem @what @cwebber
The foundational piece is hard to say in a hyper modular ecosystem.
If i would need to list the main pieces, i'd say its the interaction between the following modules:
p2p networking:
1. hyperdht
2. hyperswarm
3. hyperdht-relay
data replication protocol:
1. hypercore
2. corestore
data structures
1. hyperbee
2. hyperblob
3. hyperdrive
4. hyperdb
multiwriter
1. autobase
There are many more useful modules build and maintained by many ecosystem devs
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