• moved index.html and styles.css to src/templates/default
• will now export the generated files to /dist
• updated styles with some common practices
  • removed use of ch - nobody uses this because it's only useful for monospaced fonts
  • removed direct injections to html not because it's bad practice or anything but because all of the styles that were applied to it could be moved down to the body level, which is where they are now
  • apply font-family directly to text instead of indirect attribution
• added a div of class content +css where the main content lives
• added styles for a, a nice highlight color
• renamed variable read_me toreadme - totally nitting
• beefed up the .gitignore

Genesis

An almost mvp of weird.

Overview

Create and view pages which are generated incrementally using Perseus. Absolutely no styling whatsoever, only simple HTML.

Routes

Simply navigating to index should suffice. However, there are 3 routes

• / : The homepage
• /create : The form for creating a new page.
• /link/<your username> : The created page that is fetched from the database

Notes

Currently all data is inserted and fetched from the database in a very crude and insecure way. This is just to init and demonstrate the app. This also doesn't implement editing the existing page.

Business Plan

I plan to write the Weird version of what I already wrote for a former employer: https://blog.meilisearch.com/meilisearch-open-business-plan-v0-1/

This article explains my basic investor/builder thesis: https://spicylobster.itch.io/jumpy/devlog/337996/everlasting-games

It’s the Open Product Recipe. WordPress vs Movable Type Discourse vs VBulletin Mattermost vs Slack Strapi vs Contentful etc.

In the short term, the open approach is a Good Enough differentiator. In the long term, it’s an objectively better way to build.

So this is what we’re doing for weird-app as well. Starting with a linksapp as the smallest atomic unit upon which a much larger product and company can be built.

Weird’s parent company ethos will be the same as @spicylobstergames : https://spicylobster.itch.io/jumpy/devlog/356201/spicy-lobster-open-gamedev-company

Co-ownership & equity

Everyone I work with is a potential co-owner of whichever project we’re doing together. I’ve no interest in being the majority owner of anything I build, since I’m not much of a solo-builder.

In fact, I don’t really think it’s good for a company/product to have any owner with more than 5% ownership, assuming it’s big enough to have 20+ people involved.

So even if let’s say me and one other founding dev built this company + product just the two of us together as 50/50 partners (which is already not the case, as we’ve presently got several collaborators involved❤️‍🔥),the long-term intent would be to bring our total ownership % down to 5% over the next few years.

I also don’t think someone who’s not actively working in a company should get to sit on their share for very long until it starts automatically being sold off. I’m no fan of rent-seeking dynamics.

@jbutterwick said: I've been imagining a software house as a worker-owned co-op based on some of ideas I've heard from Yanis Varoufakis at his talks for DiEM25, still finding my way of course, but it sounds like you've got some strong ideas and ideals around this This talk of his https://youtu.be/9aK4OztueuE?t=3861 has helped shape some of my ideas on the subject of organizational hierarchy and ownership I don't necessarily agree with absolutely everything about it but as a model I quite enjoy his proposal

Investment

I’ve looked around at a lot investors to find some that align with my values, and I’ve found one clear favorite: https://calmfund.com

In short, they focus on taking a revenue split rather than hoping for some big exit. Also, they actually require that a company is earning about $5000/month before they invest, meaning they intentionally have limited leverage.

There are other great options out there like https://oss.capital (quite like YC specialized in open source & cloud) and https://mozilla.vc, but Calm provides the best possible starting point with a very gentle on-ramp.

Calm is Plan A, I.e. spending the next year trying to simply make a small and steady profit. What’s really cool about them is that they also don’t do the all-or-nothing pitch. Instead they invite founders to simply get in touch with them and keep an open line going.

So as soon as we’re making $50/month, I’ll start pitching to them.

Values

https://blog.meilisearch.com/meilisearch-values-v0-1-tech-is-political/

Note: This is a WIP document. I had this lying around for weeks as an unfinished note, so I’d better just publish it incomplete so we can continue it together.

In no particular order (yet): to sufficiently express my identity as a netizen I require..

• group messaging: Discord (Revolt)
• safe & sovereign messaging: Element/Matrix (Commune/Matrix)
• collective thinking: GDdocs/Notion (Subconscious/Mintter)
• shared knowledge storage: Raindrop.io (Pocket)
• public, static identity: Linktree (Weird)
• personal, dynamic identity: Matrix (Chatternet)
• interactive social-sharing feed: Twitter (write.as, mastodon, chatternet, tumblr, reddit..)

They’re all (somewhat interchangeable) components of an overarching Community-platform in the making. Not one single app, but rather the entire stack I want as a community-professional as well as a regular participant. Both use-cases can and should be commercialized, for the betterment of The Commons.

Weird-app is the smallest possible beginning of this larger meta-app: a CommunityOS.

Weird starts us off somewhere in between business- and private-users.

It appeals strongly to would-be professionals who wanna get their very first homepage started with ease. These users will largely be interested in a free offer though. And while we will keep building out a free offer from the start, we will quickly have to start recommending (and helping) anyone who wants a free service to self-host for now, because we don’t (yet) have VC money to offer free at-scale.

Through various milestones of increasing feature complexity, weird-app will evolve:

1. It’s a personalized calling card.
2. It’s an identity aggregator.
3. It’s a proof of external identities.

Weird-app stack

Website generator: Perseus

Desktop app: Tauri

Centralized Identity: Ory

Connectors

Distributed identity: chatternet, keyoxide

Messaging: Revolt (+Discord)

Blog: Write.as, Tumblr

Notes: Noosphere/Subconscious, Mintter, (Notion)

Microblog: tumblr, Mastodon, Bluesky

Articles: Raindrop.io, BookWyrm, (Pocket, YakRead, Matter)

Podcasts: Listennotes (+PocketCasts)

External messaging: Email, Matrix, Signal, Telegram… (Send message through any platform, with a link to Connect Forever. I want to know if I’ve sent a message to a user on any of my connected messaging APIs.)

The Network is effectively a global jobs board, but for mutual collaborations rather than work-for-hire.

Easiest way to prototype this might be with GitHub issues/discussion. I could list my collab projects there.

On my linkspage, I want a ‘Collab’ tab. Clicking it will reveal a list of the 1, 3, 10 (max) topics/projects I’m open to collaborate on.

Mine would look something like:

• Spicy Lobster
  • Fish Folk
  • Shotcaller
• CommunityOS
  • Linksapp
  • Commune
  • Teachersapp

It might need to be split in two:

1. Working on: ..
2. Open to work on: ..

Or (1) need help and (2) offering help.

My ‘offering help’ section is the topics-based one. It goes something like:

• Open game production (talk to me if you’re trying to make and sell an open source game)
• Open comms software production (ttmi you’re making open source communications software)
• Open source strategy (ttmi you’re trying to create a sustainable open source product)

Special interests:

• Open source
• Coops
• Indie gamedev
• Rust
• Godot
• Community

GitHub profiles support topics already, so I’ve added the above to my profile repo.

Ory is likely our best bet for the auth layer of the Weird SaaS stack.

• Highly transparent, trustworthy company with solid open source principles.
• Powerful free service: https://www.ory.sh/cloud/
• Official Rust client: https://github.com/ory/kratos-client-rust
• Seamless upgrade path to a full-blown OAuth2 provider via https://github.com/ory/hydra

A linkspage must be customizable so as to become personalized. Related to #6

There are two levels to this:

1. Tweaking the parameters of the standard linkspage layout: https://help.bio.link/en/articles/5291280-how-to-create-custom-themes

2. Changing CSS/HTML files: https://jetpack.com/support/custom-css/ Example: https://www.mousereeve.com/