So it's like a social network with every type of relationship imaginable built into a low level programming language?
That's wildly cool.
This and Val Town [0] feel like they were made for each other. If you added them together with a nice front-end like mmm.page [1] I bet a million devs would sign up.
I'm working on something in a similar space that I'm hoping mihht develop into that [2]
It makes sense that the next step for the web is a more low-level social platform that works more like an agnostic API than a walled garden.
This is pretty much my plan for the next few years, with some added surprises :)
I really want to rekindle the days of geocities and flash. I call this "the cheap web" haha
I've also been working on open standards for authentication and payments within the ecosystem, but I'm not quite happy with the results yet. I don't like this world where we have to use companies like Auth0 and Stripe to build something worthwhile. I'm open to ideas!
You should look into https://small-tech.org/. I don't know if they're still active (I discovered them a few months ago, and they seemed active.) But they definitely have a similar point of view.
They are active. You can follow Aral Balkan [0] and Laura Kalbag [1] on the Fediverse. Aral is building a range of small-tech goodies, like Kitten [2], a small web development kit. And they are starting their 'Small is Beautiful' [3] livestreams again, using Owncast.
Use some type of cryptocurrency for payments, or maybe a unified interface to different cryptocurrencies.
Or maybe you can come up with something similar to a cryptocurrency that integrates with your data structure and has core things like digital signatures for secure transactions and public distributed ledger(s). It seems like there could be a way to adapt some underlying features of ScrapScript for this stuff. Maybe as part of the "lab" thing.
Why inject money into everything? I don't remember the cheap web being focused on micro transactions and ponzi schemes. That's the opposite of what the author (and many others) want.
Heyyo. Creator of mmm.page here. Fun to see it mentioned. In case it's of interest, I've been coming at this from a more GUI perspective: scriptable objects (like paper) [1] and social primitives [2].
Thanks for these links. Looks like I have a new rabbit hole to explore!
Side note: I was just watching the val.town video and at the end he mentions that "you are an object" and other people can access your properties. It immediately made me think of playing hackmud. Not sure if that's a good thing or bad!
One fundamental design principle of mine has been to be minimally prescriptive with the interface of mmm.page, so that people can create whatever they want. If that means 90s throwback, then I won't go out of my way to prevent that.
That being said, I have my thoughts on nostalgia-mining [1], and in short, believe that a more interesting visual culture today requires a more contemporary approach.
For example, one of my favorite pages is a page of hand-drawn comics combined with GIFs made by a kid [2], another is a cleverly-designed page on "soft tech" [3]. Here is an illustrative thread comparing link-in-bios and mmm.page sites made by the same person -- it's surprising how much tools can limit our self-expression [4].
Personally, I get excited when I see these examples -- a departure from the grid-confines of contemporary web design. In theory, nothing about "letting people create pages with as much freedom as possible" intrinsically = "90s web with blinking GIFs all over".
That's wildly cool.
This and Val Town [0] feel like they were made for each other. If you added them together with a nice front-end like mmm.page [1] I bet a million devs would sign up.
I'm working on something in a similar space that I'm hoping mihht develop into that [2]
It makes sense that the next step for the web is a more low-level social platform that works more like an agnostic API than a walled garden.
[0] https://www.val.town/
[1] https://build.mmm.page/
[2] https://hyperspace.so/