Discussion
Imagine there was a software collective. A group of people that collaborated on different projects, helped each other, and built a better future together. What would you do? What would you work on? What would you contribute?
This isn't a hypothetical. Fedi, please add your own reply and boost this post for reach (thank you in advance). I want to find the people that believe such a thing is possible and want to be a part of it.
@jakehamilton I'd want to contribute to desktop UI libraries, and ecosystem tooling 🤔
If an OS of choice emerges, maybe see about contributing to its UX to ensure it's broadly accessible by non-tech people as well as people who need accomodations
@jakehamilton I've been thinking in this direction as well. Even grabbed a domain already: careful.party
My own thoughts tend toward the creation of an anticapitalist software stack, starting (and possibly remaining) low-level, and more reliable, than is common now. To build on firmer foundations, so we don't have to spend so much time looking over our shoulders.
I don't think such work should be done in the open, but openly among comrades. These are my thoughts: https://lyk.so/collective.html
1. An AI-free web browser & web browser engine
2. An AI-free search engine & search index
3. An AI-free operating system & kernel
@pip @jakehamilton - so for the first two, would @Vivaldi and say Duck Duck Go get you there? Third one is getting more rare still.
@tchambers @jakehamilton @Vivaldi
For me, no.
I'm glad Vivaldi's AI-free, but I don't trust any software built on Chromium. From a security and privacy standpoint, I think people should run for the hills there.
DDG I used for years, but switched when I discovered how sketchy they are. Sure they don't have AI turned on by default, but they're still building their own AI, which is still ethically terrible. And they quietly censor adult-oriented results like for dildo sellers, even with safesearch off, and have never acknowledged it. So I can't trust DDG.
@pip @jakehamilton @Vivaldi Hmmm. What do you not trust on Chromium browser? Vivaldi has stripped out nuetered any of the Google advertising and surveillance code.
@jakehamilton - a general use programming language with both a plaintext-based representation and a node-based visual representation that can be switched between at will, as an easier onramp for non programmers to learn the skills and get useful / fun things done on a computer
- a gamelike "learn computing concepts" interactive primer written in said language
- version control for non programmers that's usable for text as well as binary files, eg images, audio/video etc
@jakehamilton I could do nice icons, visual design and polish; maybe even UX as I know how frustrating it can be when you know what a tool can do, but you, rhe user, don't know how
@jakehamilton I want to build software plumbing. At some point the collective must have contact with the rest of the world, right? What tools would help make that easy while still supporting the goals of collectivism? That's what I'd want to build.
@jakehamilton@hachyderm.io A software to create a new wave for a federated semantic web (something like ontology/knowledge graph visualisation) and/or good documentation resources on this field
@jakehamilton I'd be a fan, but while I've got two young kids plus a job plus burning available software-writing cycles on my own projects, couldn't contribute much.
But, as a teacher, I could try to get the word out to interested students and/or have them use stuff produced by such a collective in classes.
Might eventually chip in games/visualizations.
@jakehamilton Three ideas, all crazy, two potential tools:
1. A tool that tries to bring web creation back to the 2000 flash and CD-ROM days, now in wasm form. There is something to be said about these old tools (Bryce3d, Director, AS2 flash) that made people want to do stuff.
2. A museum, a digital one, full of impossible things that can only be done in a digital museum (no AI ofc).
3. A way to make interactive essays, hyper-comic style (e.g Stanley Parable, but branches are like citations).
id want to try and make something like a VCS but for beginners with a good UI and simpler than git
@jakehamilton i'd have to learn how to do this first, but i know of a couple of projects that take dirt-cheap esp32 processors and get them to boot to a python prompt. i want $10 computers that are outside the commercial software chain and are too shitty for the commercial software chain to take an interest in them — but just not-shitty enough to be useful to real people of a, say, solarpunk mindset.
@jakehamilton Working on a no-dependencies, no-build step, no-maintenance web framework and site generator: https://mastrojs.github.io
@jakehamilton I would want to work on porting the projects of others to legacy or unusual platforms
@jakehamilton so many things, but what i would probably mainly do is tools, like a VCS, compilers, and various utilities, and tutoring (which i've already done quite a few times), though for that i should really finish up properly making resources rather than scribbling on a whiteboard each time, losing everything each time
@jakehamilton I'm an obsessive self hoster, and have been filling the gaps of my stack where things have been missing.
For the most part, in recent years, this translates to HTTP(S) crawler defense, in the form of iocaine. More recently (as of this morning), I'm also working on a milter, aiming to replace rspamd (which is slop-infected, and a pain in the ass to configure anyway), in a similar spirit to (and reusing parts of) iocaine.
I'm interested in pretty much anything related to self hosting, and making that easier. Like, I wrote a small howto on running Prosody in my homelab, behind a Wireguard tunnel, while still allowing voice & video calls from external networks (by running a STUN/TURN server on the fronting VPS).
If there was such a collective, I'd continue working on crawler/spam defense, and writing documentation about how to self-host this and that without relying on The Cloud™ too much.
@jakehamilton software for the local council, so they could spend taxes on services for local people instead of sending money to Microsoft, oracle etc…
@jakehamilton
What would *I* do? I cant code.
I would use the software if the project is socially cool and the software not too far behind common floss stuff.
I would write bug reports & feature requests & kind words to the devs.
@jakehamilton You'll probably have tons of coders, so even though I can write basically anything back-end/systems related, that should be figured out.
You do need to make tribal knowledge easily accessible. I would write documentation for internal processes and write scripts and tools that make the work easier. Tons of easily composable automations that make the onboarding and development process easy and fun. Remove the error-prone and frustating parts of writing software.
@jakehamilton Still dreaming of an old friends idea: Building a base like an OS that can load different editing capabilities like type setting or image manipulation tools. Not needing to load whole apps, maybe more like a terminal.
@jakehamilton I contribute usually writing because I like it, frugal and affordable monitoring/observability because that's my specialty and "tooling".
these days, I'm also very good at migrations, de-cluttering and moving people out of vendors (de-clouding ;)) to shrink down dependence to the bare minimum.
@jakehamilton great question and Initiative! We're doing this for a couple of years now and love it! Our recommendation is to not focus on the tech but the politics: What are your shared values, how do you want to work together, what would your ideal society look like. This will help find projects you can really get behind as a collective.
Also we have a local first approach, meaning we operate in our city, meet regularly in person and build strong relationships with people/groups we work with.
@jakehamilton We build @lauti and a personal digital security analysis tool, help self-organized groups who share our values with websites, FOSS hosting and trainings.
Furthermore we're part of @coopcloud
@jakehamilton This sounds like an amazing concept. I don't have any concrete ideas yet, but I really like the vision and many of the replies that have already accumulated.
Personally, I'd love to see the #FOSS stack for an independent municipality develop and generally software helping to reduce waste, improve sustainability, and foster real community between actual humans. As a software developer, I could help with building the software itself, but also with trying to construct an ecosystem around it (as this is often where the real use derives from) and keeping it well-documented.
@jakehamilton hi I'm a teacher who makes public domain software for teachers about self organising their work and allowing some degree of digital sovereignty... I also write stuff about how DIY more is a good thing.. www.edumentic.com .. I'm just worried that we will all get too dependant on the tech oligarchy and forget we can do a fair bit for ourselves...
@jakehamilton I would work on tools to support a secure, repeatable, automated build & release process
Devs hate that shit and many are convinced AI is gonna give it to them at the cost of a skillful prompt. Nope, it's really neither secure nor deterministic
@jakehamilton I am not a software creator but I am a writer! I would write and edit documentation. I like to make technical documents more accessible for people like me.
Clemens and me are so deep into this fedi stuff https://codeberg.org/Menschys/fedi-codebase
[edit]
(by the time of writing codeberg still was out) …
@sl007 @jakehamilton
Thank you for working to improve the fediverse. I recently found a historical analogy that resonates with me - in 1776 of of the first acts of the American independence movement was to build its own post office and establish an expectation of privacy in communications.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-post-office-and-privacy/
@jakehamilton I'd advocate for user rights, software freedom, digital sovereignty, etc.
I could build any software, given the time, but I have already made a compiler, a text editor, an OS, etc. I'd love to tackle the large stuff that no one wants to chip away at.
@jakehamilton I would probably love writing documentation and tutorials for the software and the group, helping with outreach
@aj
> a team are designing the ‘50 machines to build society’ and releasing open-source designs for them all
I suspect they got this idea from the GNU Project, which originally set out to be something like;
> a software version of this idea ... 50 softwares to run a society
Although most people now associate it with the OS, whose distros started with GNU components plus Linux, there are many GNU packages that sit on top of the OS and do other things.
@aj this hits so many things I care about. I hadn't heard of something like this, but would absolutely love to know more (and eventually see it completed)!
@jakehamilton I'm a techie, of which there will likely be too many already in the initiative. But you can count me in.
I'd bring in the skills that made me successful at work, leveraging my decades of software experience: mentoring, helping people see the big picture, building a strategic vision, anticipating the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, API design, versioning, optimization and resource frugality, fighting not-invented-here syndrome.
@jbqueru I love that you mention mentorship. It is something we need so much more of!
@jakehamilton Back in the 80s when I started to code, a lot of software was in the one-person to one-pizza range. But that's now very far from the case, we're talking in hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people. That means that the vast majority of software engineering is now about managing such organizations and their people, not about coding.
Making a difference will require that people be made central to the initiative, software secondary.
If I were involved, I would bring collaboration skills - things like negotiating plans that everyone can agree on, figuring out together what kinds of mutual support different people thrive on, etc.
That is most functioning open source projects.
...anything that needs doing? I would love some deduplication though, I'm pretty sure every second open source project I've seen uses a different framework for UI or math or something.
The problem with open source is that onboarding and documentation is generally not good enough.
Even #linux kind of sort of expects people to study things and "just show up" and "figure it out".
@bmaxv I do think this diversity in software ecosystem is good, though. We come up with different solutions, which all have different trade-offs. Also, we programmers always need exercising the adaptating to new codebases 😅
Tho I have to say that in the case of Linux, it's very much on a subsystem-by-subsystem basis. Some do have excellent docs, like drm and Rust compat.
"Some do have excellent docs"
Haha, gottem, that was bait.
What I mostly mean, is that open source projects don't have a catalogue of educational requirements, that you could hand a high schooler with high self motivation, point them to a library or "the internet" and say "go learn that, see you in three years, you know everything you need to know to contribute and become part of the community".
1/2
I tried getting into some projects a few times and it was mostly a "pick anything you *like*" and I want to help, but I don''t have a deep emotional connection to bug fixing quaternions or something. And then "oh well, not that issue, that's kind of complicated and needs explanation" and then nobody has time for that and I would be stuck self learning 100s of things when I need like 5 but I don't know which 5 and where to learn them.
I agree with you 98% though 😅
2/2
@jakehamilton I honestly don't really know. Right now I feel like I /should/ look more into osdev, but that also kinda feels like a reaction to all of the… everything.
I also think there's a lot of room to make non-trivial network simulation easier/more accessible… (Beyond the "emulate a single switch with maybe a preconfigured NAT-towards-the-physical-network" that libvirt gives you.)
@jakehamilton I work on libraries to allow small IoT devices to communicate securely and interoperably, without using too much power or radio spectrum -- and ideally by default, without inconveniencing user or developer. A lot of that happens in and around the @ariel / @RIOT_OS community, and right now at the #IETF #hackathon.
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