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!
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.
Here's where the first piece of @spritely@social.coop'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!
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.
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!
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!
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!
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm asking for your support, for you (yes you!) to help out @spritely@social.coop, 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. 💜
https://spritely.institute/donate/
Christine Lemmer-Webber