Specifying Spring ‘83
Metadata
Highlights
- What do you want from the internet, anyway?
- I want to follow people who are interesting to me, in a way that’s simple, expressive, and predictable.
I want this to work, furthermore, whether those people are sharing a random thought every day, a blog post every week, or an art project every two years.
And I want it to work, of course, across media, so I can follow writers, musicians, programmers, theorists, troublemakers …
- This means I’m uninterested in the projects that accept Twitter’s design as sensible and try to implement it “better”. (I’m thinking of Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, and Bluesky.) A decentralized or federated timeline is still a timeline, and for me, the timeline is the problem.
- RSS is too stark. I follow a lot of RSS feeds, and I appreciate them, and I almost want to leave it at that; nothing’s more boring than re-litigating RSS. I will just observe that there is something about this technology that has seemed, over the years, to scold rather than invite; enclose rather than expand; and strip away rather than layer upon.
- For my part, I believe presentation is fused to content; I believe presentation is a form of content; so RSS cannot be the end of the story.
- Furthermore, email’s crusty underpinnings, though they are precisely what make it so sturdy, really pinch at a moment when the web’s expressive power is waxing strong.
- For me, the recent resurgence of the email newsletter feels not much like a renaissance, and more like a massing of exhausted refugees in the last reliable shelter.
- conjuring of the deep opportunities and excitements of this global machine. I’ll say it again. There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized.
- Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted
- You might update your board twice an hour or twice a month; you might amend one sentence or reboot the whole thing. Publishing a new version is instantaneous, as easy as tapping a button. You don’t have to manage a server to publish a board; you don’t even have to establish an account on a server.
- Note: reminds me of locket but web-based and with full user agency to create what they want. their own little pocket of the internet. Love the no account part and think that’s super important..
- This is a “pull-only” protocol. As a user, you don’t see anything you didn’t specifically ask to see; no notifications, no recommendations, no unsolicited messages.
- In a self-certifying system, content carries its own durable provenance, allowing a network of servers to share it between them, and if one or two or a hundred are malefactors bent on deception, who cares? They can’t fool us.
- Fine, okay, I get it! And yet: the last thing I want to do is start an internet business, even a cute, “sustainable” one. Databases terrify me. I’m offline for long stretches of the year. How is this possibly going to work?
- Protocols aren’t only for using; they are for implementing. That’s part of their value in the world. They support negotations between devices, yes — and also conversations, even games, between people. This has been forgotten as protocols have gotten more complicated, but when I read the early RFCs, I get it so clearly: protocol as puzzle, argument, joke!
- And one of the interesting things about Spring ‘83 is that when you operate a server, you get a universe for free.
- Ten million boards gives us a maximum disk space requirement of 22.17 gigabytes, easily stored on a commodity hard drive or a cheap-enough cloud volume. A capable computer could even hold that in RAM. Turns out, when you don’t store every user’s entire history, plus a record of every advertisement they’ve ever seen, your database can stay pretty slim!
- Note: the limit on history is interesting and feels like a missed opportunity. in a world where storage is so cheap, we should be able to keep our own histories! thinking about sousveillance vs. surveillance and personal panopticons
title: Specifying Spring ‘83
author: robinsloan.com
url: https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/
date: 2022-11-22
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
Specifying Spring ‘83
Metadata
Highlights
- Indeed, I want to make a case for protocols — for whole little social networks — as investigations and experiments. It doesn’t take a million users, or a thousand, or even a hundred, to learn genuinely interesting and important things: about the protocols themselves, about new ways of relating online, about people in all their glorious weirdness.
- Give it a few evenings. Imagine something new; describe it as clearly as you can. You don’t have to actually build your something — you don’t even have to publish your description. It’s the imagining and the describing, the challenging work of expressing your dreams and desires clearly, that turns out to be useful and bracing … and fun!
- Mentions seem simple, but I think they’re hugely fraught, and not only when they become a vector for harassment and abuse. I suspect the fairy tales tell us something real and true: names have power, and the invocation of a name always carries an impact. Even when it’s nothing but nice! Like ringing a bell.
I don’t, however, think the solution is a jet cockpit’s worth of access controls. Rather, I suspect there might be some clever new formulation of the “mention” waiting out there, just waiting to be discovered …
- Platform design seems to me now like a sharp hilltop with steep slopes descending in both directions. A platform built around twitchy compulsion will trend towards addiction; a platform built around stolid patience will trend towards … forgetting about it.
- So, the partisans of patience need some new tricks. We need ways of claiming space on screens — asserting the existence of our alternatives — without conceding an inch to the twitchosphere. Email works, of course; it’s likely you’re reading this newsletter because of an email. I just think there ought to be more than one (1) crusty digital distribution channel we can depend on.
- It takes a weird kind of person to want to host other people’s content.
Like, it’s kind of insane! Host content for people who you don’t KNOW? And take on, perforce, either (a) the obligation to moderate it upfront, “reading everything”—impossible — or (b) the burden of knowing you didn’t, so those weirdos could be out there posting anything, right now?
- Digital spaces are sometimes analogized to homes or restaurants, with the implication that of course you’re free to kick someone out, just as you would in your home or restaurant. Back before I’d ever hosted anything for anyone, I nodded along to this analogy, but now I see that it’s incomplete, because people only visit your home or restaurant while you’re there. These real spaces are, by the standards of digital spaces, almost impossibly well-moderated.
- This suggests a challenge: could you design a protocol that truly makes people responsible for their own content, eliminating or at least blunting the peril and stress of hosting? That puts us back in the world of “everybody should just host their own content on their own website”, which is, of course, what some people have been saying is necessary for decades. Well, it hasn’t caught on yet, and I don’t see any indication that it will … but maybe there is some analogy available, some reproduction of that arrangement on a different level, that could begin to address this challenge.
- But we, as users of the global internet, cannot just ride the same rollercoaster again. It’s too embarrassing to be trapped inside these hungry corporate gambits, these dumb proper nouns. The nouns and verbs of our online relationships should be lowercase, the way “magazine” is lowercase, the way “movie” is lowercase. Anybody can make a movie. Anybody can try.
- Does this protocol recreate something that already exists?
The opportunity before us, as investigators and experimenters in the 2020s, isn’t to make Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram again, just “in a better way” this time. Repeating myself from above: a decentralized or federated timeline is still a timeline, and for me, the timeline is the problem.
This digital medium remains liquid, protean, full of potential. Even after a decade of stasis, these pixels, and the ways of relating behind them, will eagerly become whatever you imagine.
Specifying Spring ‘83
Metadata
Highlights
- What do you want from the internet, anyway?
- I want to follow people who are interesting to me, in a way that’s simple, expressive, and predictable.
I want this to work, furthermore, whether those people are sharing a random thought every day, a blog post every week, or an art project every two years.
And I want it to work, of course, across media, so I can follow writers, musicians, programmers, theorists, troublemakers …
- This means I’m uninterested in the projects that accept Twitter’s design as sensible and try to implement it “better”. (I’m thinking of Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, and Bluesky.) A decentralized or federated timeline is still a timeline, and for me, the timeline is the problem.
- RSS is too stark. I follow a lot of RSS feeds, and I appreciate them, and I almost want to leave it at that; nothing’s more boring than re-litigating RSS. I will just observe that there is something about this technology that has seemed, over the years, to scold rather than invite; enclose rather than expand; and strip away rather than layer upon.
- For my part, I believe presentation is fused to content; I believe presentation is a form of content; so RSS cannot be the end of the story.
- Furthermore, email’s crusty underpinnings, though they are precisely what make it so sturdy, really pinch at a moment when the web’s expressive power is waxing strong.
- For me, the recent resurgence of the email newsletter feels not much like a renaissance, and more like a massing of exhausted refugees in the last reliable shelter.
- conjuring of the deep opportunities and excitements of this global machine. I’ll say it again. There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized.
- Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted
- You might update your board twice an hour or twice a month; you might amend one sentence or reboot the whole thing. Publishing a new version is instantaneous, as easy as tapping a button. You don’t have to manage a server to publish a board; you don’t even have to establish an account on a server.
- Note: reminds me of locket but web-based and with full user agency to create what they want. their own little pocket of the internet. Love the no account part and think that’s super important..
- This is a “pull-only” protocol. As a user, you don’t see anything you didn’t specifically ask to see; no notifications, no recommendations, no unsolicited messages.
- In a self-certifying system, content carries its own durable provenance, allowing a network of servers to share it between them, and if one or two or a hundred are malefactors bent on deception, who cares? They can’t fool us.
- Fine, okay, I get it! And yet: the last thing I want to do is start an internet business, even a cute, “sustainable” one. Databases terrify me. I’m offline for long stretches of the year. How is this possibly going to work?
- Protocols aren’t only for using; they are for implementing. That’s part of their value in the world. They support negotations between devices, yes — and also conversations, even games, between people. This has been forgotten as protocols have gotten more complicated, but when I read the early RFCs, I get it so clearly: protocol as puzzle, argument, joke!
- And one of the interesting things about Spring ‘83 is that when you operate a server, you get a universe for free.
- Ten million boards gives us a maximum disk space requirement of 22.17 gigabytes, easily stored on a commodity hard drive or a cheap-enough cloud volume. A capable computer could even hold that in RAM. Turns out, when you don’t store every user’s entire history, plus a record of every advertisement they’ve ever seen, your database can stay pretty slim!
- Note: the limit on history is interesting and feels like a missed opportunity. in a world where storage is so cheap, we should be able to keep our own histories! thinking about sousveillance vs. surveillance and personal panopticons