NOTE: This update also appeared on my Patreon account. If you're reading the below and it sounds like I'm doing a lot of useful work, consider becoming a patron!

Hello all! It's been a couple of months since I've gotten out an update; much has happened.

First of all, ActivityPub Conf happened and was a big success! The video team got things recorded an uploaded so you can watch talks from the event, including my keynote (the audio quality is a bit messed up on this one, the others are better) and Mark Miller's keynote. The other talks were all also very excellent; I'm not going to iterate them all here because you can already go watch them! I think you will find there are many thematic threads between the videos.

We had about 40 people at the event; the first day was spent on talks and the second day was an "unconference" where groups self-organized to discuss various topics of mutual interest. One common thread was about the kinds of directions I've been pushing for in Spritely: distributed encrypted storage (Datashards, with Serge Wroclawski leading the conversation on that), object capabilities (OcapPub), stamps, etc. It was interesting to watch from the start to the end of the unconference day; particularly, the Pleroma folks were there and gave a lot of feedback. Towards the start of the day I think there was much more skepticism, but towards the end we were hearing belief and interest that these kinds of things could and should be implemented and would be of real use to fediverse participants. Lain of Pleroma in particular expressed that it helped to realize that even though I'm presenting all these ideas, they don't need to be implemented all at once; we can take them on piecemeal, and incrementalism is a perfectly valid approach. (Also "OcapPub" sounds like a new protocol, whereas it's really just a way-to-use ActivityPub mostly as it already exists. Maybe time for a new name for that?)

Anyway, ActivityPub Conf was a massive success; thank you everyone who came and participated. It's clear after APConf to me just how much of a difference getting folks together can make. For those who couldn't make it, let's thank the video team (DeeAnn Little, Sebastian Lasse, Markus Feilner) for getting those videos up!

On the topic of Datashards, we have a website and a nice logo now (courtesy of mray, who also made the ActivityPub logo). Serge Wroclawski (co-host with myself of Libre Lounge) has been increasingly helping with the project; before ActivityPub Conference and Rebooting Web of Trust we worked to make sure both of our implementations could talk to each other (Serge's Python implementation and my Racket implementation). At RWoT we showed a demo where I "beamed" the death star plans to Serge's computer. (We used the same content storage server, I uploaded the death star plans, rendered the QR code on my laptop, Serge scanned the QR code from his laptop, downloaded the file and showed off the plans from his computer... with the storage server having no idea about the contents of the data we were storing there!) People really liked that demo; we have had conversations about whether Datashards may serve as a foundational system for some other tools being made in that space; more later. In the meanwhile, I'm happy we have two applications in two different languages successfully being able to read and write each others' immutable datashards updates; the next step is making sure that mutability works the same.

Rebooting Web of Trust was also a very interesting event; the highlight being that I am now collaborating with some great folks on a secure user interfaces paper. We are taking the existing Mastodon web user interface and retooling it to reduce risks such as phishing, and open the path for more peer to peer systems (very timely, since that's the direction we want to take things). Unfortunately the amount of work to do on the paper is rather huge; it may take a while until the paper is complete. In the meanwhile, the Petnames paper has turned out to be a pre-requisite for the secure UIs one; that paper has been nearly complete for some time so I guess I have to finish the work. I recently added some new UI mockups to it, but there is still more to do.

Now that these conferences are over, I am putting time towards Spritely's core vision again: distributed virtual worlds. The foundational layer for that is Spritely Goblins, an ocap-secure distributed programming environment on top of Racket. I really enjoy hacking on this and I am happy to get time back to working on it. A topic of discussion came up between myself and Mark Miller at Rebooting Web of Trust though; am I unnecessarily duplicating effort between myself and the Agoric folks? In particular, they are building something equivalent (and arguably more featureful) to Spritely Goblins named SwingSet. This would run on top of Javascript rather than Racket/Lisp/Scheme. I have found that in the past I have been not very happy when working with Javascript, but Mark suggested I take a look at Agoric's Jessie subset of Javascript, which Mark described as "closer to Scheme" (not syntactically, but in terms of language-cleanliness). It does seem nicer than Javascript; when I admitted to Mark that I am addicted to parenthetical syntax, Mark posed the question about whether building a parenthetical version of Jessie would be less work than reproducing all the other things that Agoric is doing. It's a good point; I don't know. I'm unhappy with the idea of pivoting, but I do feel like it's probably true that due diligence suggests I should consider it carefully. It is true at least that I would probably reach a broader userbase more quickly with the option of Javascript syntax; it's hard for me to deny that. I will probably explore it with some smaller tests of Agoric's stuff. But in the meanwhile, I currently plan to release a very small version of the game demo using the toolkit I already am building while testing Agoric's infrastructure in parallel. I suspect we'll see the first user-visible outputs of this in early 2020.

There have been four new Libre Lounge episodes since my last update. That's still quite a few episodes to listen to, but slower than we previously were updating; all the travel is to blame. However that is settling down and I think we'll be updating more frequently soon. Even so, we have been updating!

In addition to all this, I suspect there will be at least two major announcements in the coming months; stay tuned. Work has already occured on both, but I can only say so much right now.

Thanks to everyone who has supported my work. I work much more than full time in the cause of advancing user freedom; it's not easy to fund this work. I appreciate all of you who are giving what you can.

Now, back to work!