Notices by The Spritely Institute (spritely@social.coop), page 2

Spritely is working on a lot of pieces to deliver its vision of p2p tech being the default, but there are two big ones:

- Goblins, our p2p time-traveling distributed programming environment https://spritely.institute/goblins/
- Hoot, our Scheme to Webassembly compiler https://spritely.institute/hoot/

Naturally, the most important thing to get to compile *is* Goblins on Hoot. Cirkoban used an early version of Goblins ported to Hoot as its foundation. That's what powers the time travel "undo move" in the game!

Aside from being *fun*, this gave us a real, running, actual example of Spritely's tech combined that we could not just show the world, but show ourselves.

Games force you to be very real about things! And when the tech is hard to explain, it's sometimes easier to *experience* something!

Now you may note that the two games we've focused on in this thread aren't particularly social.

Would you be shocked to hear that more social browser-based games are on the near horizon for Spritely?

Because you'd be right!

But... is that a distraction? Again... this is serious stuff!

If games became the primary deliverable, this would be a big distraction.

This is one of the reasons that Spritely does its demos in game jams: time-boxed demos that show something off, but which you can finish and step away from.

But you get something tangible in the end!

But there's a *reason* that the E programming language, which we firmly argue is the most innovative language around distributed security *ever*, grew out of a distributed virtual world environment.

Games aren't the main goal. But they do force you to be robust about *building the right things.*

First and foremost, the primary people that people use social communication tech is fun and a sense of community.

People aren't signing up to spend so much time online just to put on a stiff collar and fill out a bunch of paperwork.

Socializing is about connection. It's about enjoyment.

People need a sense of fun to want to be somewhere.

The most successful social networks became so because people found joy on them, in some way or another.

Joy, fun, entertainment, social value and connection... they're essential. Part of life. Healthy.

We won't succeed without them.

Spritely has dived deep into areas of computer science, and to those who are exploring them, these areas of programming can actually become fun in their own way!

But from the outset, they can appear academic and stiff.

There's a reason for the characters, the whimsy.

Computing can be magical.

But what about the games? The games! Yes Spritely has made quite a few games! https://spritely.institute/arcade/

Space shooters! Puzzle games! Cellular automata!

Hey, aren't you all, you know, just a bit *distracted* over there?

Actually it's all been very carefully planned! It's serious!

Before we get into our specific examples, let's point out that major pieces of technical history, including on "social media", have a connection to games.

Slack, Discord, Flickr: all meant to be part of, or broke off from, or meant to enable a video game project in some way.

The connections to games go back even further! It's well known that "Spacewar!" was one of the first video games.

Porting "Spacewar!" and also authoring Space Travel was an important part of the history of Unix as well.
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/spacetravel.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)

Spritely does fun things! We have fun characters, heck, we make VIDEO GAMES to show off our tech. And for those reasons, sometimes people write us off as not being a serious project.

This is serious business! Human rights! Lives are on the line!

We agree! That's part of why fun is *critical*!

From https://spritely.institute/about/:

> *Fun is a revolutionary act:* The reason technology tends to succeed is that people enjoy using it and get excited about it. We care deeply about human rights and activism. This is not in opposition to building tech and a community environment that fosters a sense of fun; planned carefully, fun is at the core of getting people to understand and adopt any technology we make.

Hello! It's another day of our supporter drive! https://spritely.institute/donate

And today is the last of the "Tech Values" threads: https://spritely.institute/about/

Today's tech value / design goal is "Fun as a Revolutionary Act"!

Hey! We mean it! Let's get into why!

@cerement @cwebber #spritepunk

The incredible @jfred has been playing around with using Goblins for remote Guix sysadmin'ing!

Brainstorm post: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/guix-goblins-fleet.html
Prototype post: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/gobs-of-machines.html

So cool to see!

You know, there's nothing like seeing the leadership of large corporate social media fail so terribly at understanding what "free speech" actually means and the needs of marginalized groups to remind ourselves: we're glad we're working seriously on community-oriented communication tech.

Onwards!

That's it for today's technical values! Tomorrow we will complete our tech values overview with the most fun one... quite literally! "Fun is a revolutionary act"! https://spritely.institute/about/

Thanks for listening! We appreciate all the support we have gotten so far 💜 https://spritely.institute/donate

For this reason, we are a nonprofit (a US 501(c)(3) to be exact).

The Internet's original designs were largely a public works project. Enormously powerful and wonderful things can happen when technology is built in the interest of people and given to the commons.

Of course, famously, funding the commons is extremely difficult. Despite how much "easier" short term it would be to take large amounts of VC cash, we are here for the long term vision.

Did we mention we are running a public fundraising campaign? We could use your help! https://spritely.institute/donate/