is developing some damn cool tech: Distributed programming! Leading the way on a secure P2P protocol (OCapN)! A WebAssembly toolkit!

But: is "cool tech" what matters? *Why* are we trying to make cool tech? What are the *social implications* of making this technology?

I gave a talk on this recently: "Protocols and Purpose in a Global Democratic Crisis" c-tube.c-base.org/w/f9pF5pwxX8…

*None* of the decentralized social networks today are robust enough to handle the threats facing vulnerable people and activists today. Not the present-day fediverse, not Bluesky/ATProto. What can we do?

What can we do? Is there hope? Is it possible to build something better?

Spritely was born out of this work, and the strive to create infrastructure allowing for "Networks of Consent". More on that here: spui25.nl/programma/we-can-cha…

Social Media: We Can Change the Defaults

Christine Lemmer-Webber, best known as co-author of ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking protocol, will speak about the crisis technologists face. Why must we revise the default assumptions of the web 2.

^SPUI25

I love computers. When people say "Computers were a mistake!" it makes me sad.

But it's had to blame people. The direction computers have gone in, the experience people largely have had, is a loss of agency and empowerment.

How do we bring that back, and do better than ever even?

User-empowering technology is a lot of work, corporations aren't motivated to build it. We need research and development of new tech that changes the game from an org that isn't bound by pushing profit.

And that's why @spritelyinst.bsky.social is a nonprofit research lab.

So... what are we doing?

We're building cool tech:
- Goblins, p2p distributed programming: spritely.institute/goblins/
- Hoot, a WebAssembly toolkit (and Scheme->WASM compiler) spritely.institute/hoot/
- OCapN, a secure distributed p2p networked protocol ocapn.org/

But... what are we *doing* with these things?

We're big believers in having tangible examples of tech so people can understand and it's not just vaporware. Sometimes that's challenging to do with low-level tech in development. But games are a great way to show things off!

Unusually, Spritely has a whole arcade page! spritely.institute/arcade/

These games are fun and great at showing off ideas of otherwise hard-to-explain concepts. And more, in a moment, why fun and joy aren't small matters.

But... is it all just fun and games? What about actual everyday tangible use?

We're getting close to that point. Here's what we've been up to.

It's the year of dogfooding and Spritely has been using its own tech *every day* this year with a project called Pumpkin Chat codeberg.org/spritely/pumpkin-…

Alas, it's what's called "dogfood". Not fit for human consumption. But it's possible to use this tech every day, and we are. We're working on getting it out to others too.

pumpkin-chat

^Codeberg.org

We also recently put out a blogpost and demo of a chat system that *nobody* centrally hosts called "Brassica Chat" spritely.institute/news/compos…

Again, it's a demo, but you can try on it on the page. It combines capability security with cool concepts called CRDTs.

But more importantly, it's a step towards secure communication for a hostile world.

There's more... we've been busy!

GoblinShare: Secure, Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing with Goblins spritely.institute/news/goblin…

Shepherd × Goblins update spritely.institute/news/shephe…

Honestly our blog is full of interesting details of stuff we're doing! spritely.institute/news/

And we're still building key infrastructure. Goblins recently got a major upgrade to its persistence system: spritely.institute/news/sprite…

And it's about to get another one. Not really yet announced, but we're working on a hot-cache system that loads actors from store on demand. It's neat!

We also have another mini demo coming out soon. It's not our main focus, but @tsyesika has been working on a mini demo of an ActivityPub server built on top of Goblins. (Someone with money wanna fund this? 😛)

That's a teaser, some blogposts coming out soon (but again, not our main focus until we can get funding for it)