Mastodon and Webbly
I was going to title this post “Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together”, but I expect most of my readers are too young to get the reference, so I’ll just dive right in:
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Glitch gave literally millions of people a chance to build something on the web without having to wrestle with NPM or webpack or set up a server or deal with any of the other crap that Sumana Harihareswara has dubbed inessential weirdness. It was beautiful and useful, but it wasn’t profitable enough for Fastly to keep it alive.
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But the idea of a low-overhead in-the-browser way for the 99% to build things didn’t start with Glitch and hasn’t died with it either. Projects like Webbly (source here) are still trying to let people use the web to build the web. However, someone has to host these things somewhere: who’s going to do that, and where? More specifically, can we construct a hosting solution that isn’t tied to a particular company and therefore doesn’t have a singular point of failure?
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Well, what about Mastodon? Its authors and users are deeply committed to decentralization and federation, and more people are running servers for particular communities every day. What if (wait, hear me out) what if Webbly was bundled with Mastodon so that Mastodon site admins could provide an in-the-browser page-building experience to their users simply by saying “yes” to one configuration option?
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Why would they do that? My answer is, “Take a look at Mastodon’s default browser interface.” It lets you add a couple of pictures and a few links to your profile, but that’s less than MySpace offered twenty years ago. I am 100% certain that if Mastodon came with an easy in-browser page builder, people would use it to create all sorts of wonderful things. (Awful ones too, of course, but Mastodon site admins already have to grapple with content admin.)
Greenspun’s Tenth Rule is that every sufficiently complicated program contains a mediocre implementation of Lisp. Equally, I think every useful web-based tool is trying to be what Visual Basic was in the 1990s and WordPress was to the early web: useful, right there, and a gradual ramp for new users rather than a cliff to climb. I think the sort of people who built useful little things with Glitch would do amazing things with Webbly if it was married to their social media. I also think that allowing people to create custom home pages or tweak their feeds would draw a lot of new users away from fragile, centralized systems like X and Bluesky. I know that I’ve been wrong far more often than I’ve been right, but this really does feel promising.