By Tess |
March 20, 2025, edited March 20, 2025
in a world where everything's computer, computer should be friend. computer should make you feel warm and fuzzy. when you wake up in the morning you should look forward to operating computer. computer should love you, and you should love computer.
but
computer suggests you search that with Bing.
computer requires you to agree to the updated terms and conditions.
haha, only little computer can do that silly. please install the program on little computer. unless you want to do this. you need to go to the website on big computer for this.
computer wants you to share your contacts with Bink-2-Boink. Bink-2-Boink also needs your location. do you want to share fine-grained location with Bink-2-Boink?
computer has improved while you were sleeping. yay! oh, did you like the button that did the thing. well that's gone away on new computer. get used to it. bitch.
many of us accept these experiences as a fact of life in the modern world. however, computer is not a force of nature beyond our control. computer is put together by humans, and so with vision and hard work we can make computer better.
some of these phenomena are systemic issues, emerging from the interactions between large-scale entities and systems. these domains are hard to make an impact in without Real Power over people and organizations. but this is not the only angle from which to approach the problem. I'm going to start with the resources I'm personally rich in (optimism, creative thinking and personal engineering capacity) and work from there. with this strategy I hope to take a bite out of the problemspace, and inspire other entities to do the same.
a guiding principle for me is to not directly compete with existing paradigms, but instead to innovate at the paradigm level to give myself a comparative advantage. it's hard to build a better XYZ app, but you only need to do that to compete in the same commercialized landscape "app" ecosystems were built to serve.
as a concrete example, I wrote about the boring everything app a few weeks ago. while still in the idea phase, this paradigm shift continues to be my main focus.
there's lots of software people find friendshaped already out there! I myself find my personal desktop Linux stack quite pleasant (for those curious, it's Arch, Sway, Wezterm, Kate, Synapse and Syncthing held together by my own scripts, and using a user-based security model). lots of my friends are delighted by their Nix and/or Emacs setups. generally community-built open source software has capacity to become friendshaped when it works well enough to meet users expectations. boutique commercial software can also be good though, it's really the megacorp products that tend to be user-hostile.
the problem is there's a lot of increasingly important domains with a distinct lack of useable friendshaped options. the little computer is a major one, along with all the usecases primarily associated with it. social media is another (somewhat optimistic about AT proto and even ActivityPub, but they both have their issues). also community-built software has a long-standing innovation problem. it seems far easier to create an open clone of an existing thing than come up with something entirely new. this implies there's a whole world of ideas and paradigms that aren't commercially viable, but would make fantastic open source projects if only they could be discovered.
I want to build something that embodies these ideals, and also is concretely useful to myself and others. I want to build a dead simple "platform" of sorts that's portable, secure, customizable and, above all else, friend.
the end goal hasn't changed much from last time, but I've decided not to dive in code-first.
a bad implementation is easy (the software is explicitly "boring", after all). the code is not the hard part of this project. I'm going to take some time to acquire correct ideas about the critical architectural decisions. things like encrypted sync, collaborative editing, internal and external links, account systems, logic layer <> UI layer protocol, etc. I may write about this as it comes together.
but once I've gotten a solid foundation sketched out, I will start building.
and computer will be friend :)