The Spritely Institute
Hello! The fundraiser is going strong! We're nearly at $60k of our $80k goal! https://spritely.institute/donate/
Today we're going to go through a few more of our technical values: "User empowerment and fostering agency", "Contextual communication", and "Decentralized is the default"! Let's go!
The Spritely Institute
All of these values, as previously, can be found on our About page: https://spritely.institute/about/
We've been doing these post threads for a bit but we fell behind due to the holidays so we're doing multiple in one today!
The Spritely Institute
From https://spritely.institute/about/:
> *User empowerment and fostering agency:* We believe in users having the freedom to communicate, but also to be able to live healthy lives protected from dangerous or bad interactions. We want users to be able to live the lives they want to live, as agents in the system, to the degree that it does not harm the agency of other users in the system. Maximizing agency and minimizing subjection, not just for you and me, but for everyone, is thus is a foundation.
The Spritely Institute
This might not sound like a technical value, but it does come into play. When we think about the contours of the technology we choose to build, what kinds of effects they may make on people, we have to make decisions.
(It's also a reason we consider it important that we're a nonprofit!)
The Spritely Institute
This one's a bit philosophical! We're trying to balance here that when we consider technical goals, we're thinking about empowerment. But it can be easy to fall into the trap of focusing on our own individual empowerment without thinking about how others' empowerment is affected.
It's a push-pull, but a useful one. We're not trying to just make superusers powered on the network, we're concerned about the well being of everyone. Agency is the goal, but for everyone!
The Spritely Institute
Next is "contextual communication", which we define as:
> There is no "global town square", and we are deeply concerned about context collapse. Communication and collaboration should happen from contextual flows.
More on context collapse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
The Spritely Institute
We are not just building another Twitter, another Facebook... not even just decentralized versions of those.
When today's "social media" started to rise to power nearly two decades ago, one of the big sells was if everyone is connected to everyone all the time, society would improve.
However, while having the ability to publish and broadcast widely is good, we don't think flattened and decontextualized communication leads to the kind of world we wish to inhabit.
The Spritely Institute
Consider Alisha: a high school math teacher, a tabletop role playing game enthusiast, and a fanfiction author.
While Alisha is one person as a user of the system, she participates in different communities as these different aspects of herself. She is subject to different rules in each.
The Spritely Institute
"Context collapse" is where all aspects of your life are squished into one place. For example, when Facebook first appeared, people started getting tagged in photos of themselves in social gatherings that upset their employers.
The loss of context created social strife.
Our cofounder Randy Farmer had a coworker who once described Facebook as "The worst part of thanksgiving, every day of the year."
That's the kind of system we *don't* wish to build.
The Spritely Institute
Finally, let's discuss "Decentralized is the default":
> We are building technology foundations on top of which then the rest of our user-facing technology is built. These foundations change the game: instead of peer-to-peer, decentralized, secure tech being the realm of experts, it's the default output of software built on top of our tech.
The Spritely Institute
As you may infer from looking at these mockups, considering the needs of users in being able to inhabit a contextually rich online world that is as contextually rich as their out-of-computer interactions is something we are building our technology around.
The Spritely Institute
Despite Alisha participating in and behaving differently in her different communities, and despite only some people knowing her as each persona, Alisha is not duplicitous. She is a person with a rich life, and within different contexts she is subject to different community norms, needs, and rules.
The Spritely Institute
It's simply too hard to build secure, peer-to-peer technology today. These days you have to be an expert across a wide variety of different domains in order to engage with building secure p2p tech.
But what if secure p2p tech was the *default thing you get*. Is such a thing possible?
The Spritely Institute
The analogy here can be seen with the emergence of powerful and wonderful frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails at the beginning of the "Web 2.0" era. These frameworks not only provided the designs necessary to build "web 2.0" style applications, they taught users to *think* in them.
The Spritely Institute
For the first several years of Spritely's history, we've been focused on low-level tech. This may seem strange! Isn't the goal the next generation of decentralized social network technology?
Making it easy and the *default* to build secure p2p tech requires new tech foundations. And we have them!
The Spritely Institute
2025 will be a big change for Spritely: previously our demos have been highly technical on the one side and video games on the other.
It's no coincidence: video games are a great way to show off difficult concepts (like time travel)! More on this later.
But there's good news... most of Spritely's technical foundations are now at the point where building more user-facing tech on top is quite possible! Expect more of that in 2025!
The Spritely Institute
That's it for today's "tech values" summary. We hope you enjoyed them! Tune in Monday for more!
And in the meanwhile, if what you're hearing is music to your ears... consider pitching in! We could use your support! https://spritely.institute/donate/
Have a good weekend!
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