I've been catching myself thinking about this idea for the last two years. Maybe it's my old obsession with PKI and "personal digital infrastructures" that were both promised to us in the early days of the commercial Internet, but never turned concrete for various reasons.
IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services like email, posts, tasks, chat, IM etc. but implemented in a way that all data would be portable to other services (open standards) and its storage would be "bottomless", meaning that users wouldn't have to worry about storage limitation for photos/videos for instance, as they would be sharing resources with other nodes worldwide. There would have to be some monetary incentive(s), of course, but they would be secondary to the bigger cause of keeping a true cyber interconnected community outside big tech.
Haha that's clever! I hadn't even thought about it like that. I think today most non technical people and the news basically calls anything like an algorithmic recommendation systems "algorithms". The "algorithm" is what drives this sort of addictive feed of content that we keep looking for, hence that. But yea good point.
Hey! I think I actually posted this some days ago and it went nowhere. I keep looking for feedback but you know one of those karmic things, we don't always get it when we want it but maybe when we need it.
I guess I just look at the way tech is now and feel disappointed. Its very addictive, "social" yet lonely. I don't find the alternative networks like Reddit, Mastodon, etc much better. I have held off doing anything, cut back most of my social usage but still found problems and years ago, yes I tried to make this idea work and shut it down. But I've felt like I really needed a solution, and so I use this everyday as an alternative to other forms of media consumption. And the hope is longer term it continues to develop as a useful utility. I'll keep investing time in, slowly iterating, figuring out what works and what doesn't. I'm not looking to gamify it or seeking fame or notoriety. Tbh, if it stays small great, if I can figure out how to make "conversational networks" [1] work even better. Anyway, happy to answer questions.
Go is a programming language. It’s not exactly pushing google’s ad agenda.
Your criticism of using github and discord are somewhat valid, but asking people to re-invent the wheel while they re-invent the bicycle seems like arbitrarily making up rules so everyone fails. Is there some influence you expect to leak into their platform thru github or discord?
They are standing on the shoulders of giants. There's nothing wrong with the ideals and the motivation, but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google?
And all of that culminates with: Could the level of technology and the internet reach the state it is today without big tech? And if not, was the price we paid to get here worth it?
> but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google?
No, it doesn't.
Obviously Mu could exist without Go, if Google stopped development on the language, its current state could be forked (Go 2). Lots of programming languages exist without Google's support, there are even programming languages older than Google.
C is also a programming language. Unlike go it foes not depend on a big tech company for it to live.
No need to reinvent the wheel. Just use wheel that does not come with a big techh bagagge.
go does push silly things. besides being overhyped, they block anonimizing tech when accessing package repos for example.
you dont want anything to do with google or anything they make or host. they will only do it to extract shit from you. they dont give nything dont be naive.
Maybe not their ad agenda, but certainly one of their agendas. Specifically, the agenda they have to get young, inexperienced developers prepared for specifically the software development practices they employ internally.
It was directly stated that "Go is not for clever developers" and that their target is recent graduates with limited experience. It punishes you for trying to think about what you're building and to design sophisticated software, relying more on brute force. It doesn't encourage you to reach higher.
I don’t know where you are on your career journey, but having worked with countless clients, business domains, and projects as a freelancer I value readability over everything else.
If you’re working on a greenfield project in a team of one then I suppose it’s great to get in an expressive mood and emit your code poetry from those fingertips.
It’s very different to inherit a quirky puzzle and reverse engineer a mental model from there.
I've been writing software with Go for over a decade now so it's just down to ease of use and what I know. It's performant, straightforward, compiled. It's a no nonsense language and does what it says. I'm not the type to get into language wars. I have a tool, I use it, that's it. Thanks for the question.
Sorry trying to fix that. It's an installable PWA but you can still use it as a website like any other. I have it installed on my phone. I guess I catered for my on usecase. Hopefully its partially fixed.
Fair point, I'm not an Invidious user but I also feel like Video is part of a suite of services that I personally use, so I wanted to incorporate that way. There's lots of single purpose solutions to many things, I don't think that's the goal here. The idea is to look at the multiple habits that occur across social and put them in one place in a simple consumable format that just gives you what you need rather than promoting idle scrolling/clicking, etc
There is more honesty in failing for the sake of ideals than in winning without them. It is a story that shaped many before and will shape many after, and mu may simply be one more instance of that enduring truth.
Yes, I did try this once before and had to "check" my own motivations at the time. After making an attempt to raise funding again I realised I wasn't honest in my intentions, so I shut it down and tried to cut back my social usage and figure out what else to work on. Guess I still felt there was something here.
I've been catching myself thinking about this idea for the last two years. Maybe it's my old obsession with PKI and "personal digital infrastructures" that were both promised to us in the early days of the commercial Internet, but never turned concrete for various reasons.
IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services like email, posts, tasks, chat, IM etc. but implemented in a way that all data would be portable to other services (open standards) and its storage would be "bottomless", meaning that users wouldn't have to worry about storage limitation for photos/videos for instance, as they would be sharing resources with other nodes worldwide. There would have to be some monetary incentive(s), of course, but they would be secondary to the bigger cause of keeping a true cyber interconnected community outside big tech.
They say that it's free from algorithms, but I found several uses of hash maps just from a quick glance through the source.
Haha that's clever! I hadn't even thought about it like that. I think today most non technical people and the news basically calls anything like an algorithmic recommendation systems "algorithms". The "algorithm" is what drives this sort of addictive feed of content that we keep looking for, hence that. But yea good point.
Hey! I think I actually posted this some days ago and it went nowhere. I keep looking for feedback but you know one of those karmic things, we don't always get it when we want it but maybe when we need it.
I guess I just look at the way tech is now and feel disappointed. Its very addictive, "social" yet lonely. I don't find the alternative networks like Reddit, Mastodon, etc much better. I have held off doing anything, cut back most of my social usage but still found problems and years ago, yes I tried to make this idea work and shut it down. But I've felt like I really needed a solution, and so I use this everyday as an alternative to other forms of media consumption. And the hope is longer term it continues to develop as a useful utility. I'll keep investing time in, slowly iterating, figuring out what works and what doesn't. I'm not looking to gamify it or seeking fame or notoriety. Tbh, if it stays small great, if I can figure out how to make "conversational networks" [1] work even better. Anyway, happy to answer questions.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11714
Ambitious. Very hard to achieve. But if we use go, github and discord for building the "anti big tech" stack - then we have failed from the start.
Go is a programming language. It’s not exactly pushing google’s ad agenda.
Your criticism of using github and discord are somewhat valid, but asking people to re-invent the wheel while they re-invent the bicycle seems like arbitrarily making up rules so everyone fails. Is there some influence you expect to leak into their platform thru github or discord?
They are standing on the shoulders of giants. There's nothing wrong with the ideals and the motivation, but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google?
And all of that culminates with: Could the level of technology and the internet reach the state it is today without big tech? And if not, was the price we paid to get here worth it?
> but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google?
No, it doesn't.
Obviously Mu could exist without Go, if Google stopped development on the language, its current state could be forked (Go 2). Lots of programming languages exist without Google's support, there are even programming languages older than Google.
C is also a programming language. Unlike go it foes not depend on a big tech company for it to live. No need to reinvent the wheel. Just use wheel that does not come with a big techh bagagge.
go does push silly things. besides being overhyped, they block anonimizing tech when accessing package repos for example.
you dont want anything to do with google or anything they make or host. they will only do it to extract shit from you. they dont give nything dont be naive.
> It’s not exactly pushing google’s ad agenda.
Maybe not their ad agenda, but certainly one of their agendas. Specifically, the agenda they have to get young, inexperienced developers prepared for specifically the software development practices they employ internally.
It was directly stated that "Go is not for clever developers" and that their target is recent graduates with limited experience. It punishes you for trying to think about what you're building and to design sophisticated software, relying more on brute force. It doesn't encourage you to reach higher.
I don’t know where you are on your career journey, but having worked with countless clients, business domains, and projects as a freelancer I value readability over everything else.
If you’re working on a greenfield project in a team of one then I suppose it’s great to get in an expressive mood and emit your code poetry from those fingertips.
It’s very different to inherit a quirky puzzle and reverse engineer a mental model from there.
And AI-powered chat.
Otherwise it looked very interesting, I like the idea of a flat-fee structure without subscriptions.
Why go?
I've been writing software with Go for over a decade now so it's just down to ease of use and what I know. It's performant, straightforward, compiled. It's a no nonsense language and does what it says. I'm not the type to get into language wars. I have a tool, I use it, that's it. Thanks for the question.
Why am I unable to test any of it's features without being prompted to install a Chromium "app"?
Sorry trying to fix that. It's an installable PWA but you can still use it as a website like any other. I have it installed on my phone. I guess I catered for my on usecase. Hopefully its partially fixed.
Is this why nothing happens when I click on any of the services in Firefox? There is no feedback at all.
I don't know that there's much value to, for example, creating another web based YouTube front-end when Invidious exists
Fair point, I'm not an Invidious user but I also feel like Video is part of a suite of services that I personally use, so I wanted to incorporate that way. There's lots of single purpose solutions to many things, I don't think that's the goal here. The idea is to look at the multiple habits that occur across social and put them in one place in a simple consumable format that just gives you what you need rather than promoting idle scrolling/clicking, etc
There is more honesty in failing for the sake of ideals than in winning without them. It is a story that shaped many before and will shape many after, and mu may simply be one more instance of that enduring truth.
Is this related to the defunct mu.app from a few years back?
Answer: yes it is, I think
Yes, I did try this once before and had to "check" my own motivations at the time. After making an attempt to raise funding again I realised I wasn't honest in my intentions, so I shut it down and tried to cut back my social usage and figure out what else to work on. Guess I still felt there was something here.
Sounds like App.net all over again.
What's old is new again!
If you're still using all the same services though how exactly are you winning over addictive behaviour? eeehhhhh???