I agree that owning the data is ideal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129841

Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS.

This is an experiment towards that:

https://github.com/dharmatech/9social

The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...)

Video demo:

https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI

The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code.

And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavily inspired by an Emacs project called Org Social:

https://github.com/tanrax/org-social

I love this idea. Thank you for the examples!

I've been thinking of this as well:

Something like old school Facebook in UI, but functions more like MSN Messenger. You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.

> You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.

Yup, local-first is central to the design.

And, you only see who you explicitly follow.

I love your username!

I hope there's a sympy-thagoras out there.

( • ‿ • )

Sounds similar to scuttlebutt

I absolutely LOVE secure scuttlebutt (SSB).

Their local-first approach inspired that aspect of the 9social design.

However, a big difference is that SSB is a sophisticated protocol.

With 9social, the heavy lifting is done by git and a set of conventions.

> I love this idea. Thank you for the examples!

Thanks for checking it out!

How to upvote in bold? /j

It's plan9 so:

"There's a filesystem for that."

¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Amazing that it can run in plan9!

It would be awesome if go was a first class language on 9front. I.e. ships with it.

I've been messing around with a social network for plan9:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=q6qVnlCjcAI&si=MBCeM0QdA0WsKAe7

It's all in rc and awk. There are places where go (or clojure!) would have been nice.

Love the demo for 9social! I'm not a user myself but I'm always inspired by the Plan 9 ways :)

Thanks for checking it out!

I started publishing amd64 and arm (32) binaries for Plan 9 in GH releases. I tested the amd64 one on 9front and everything seems to work. The CLI is not very Plan9-y but I'm happy to make the port more native at some point :)

Ah, awesome!

I'll head over to the releases.

While reading though this book, I messed around with a basic computer algebra simplifier in Lean:

https://github.com/dharmatech/symbolism.lean

It's a port of code from C#.

Lean is astonishingly expressive.

How was the process of getting used to the ortholinear keyboard?

It took me much shorter than I expected, maybe a week or two. I'm quite quick on it now.

How was the process of getting used to the ortholinear keyboard?

There was a bit of a learning curve, but I was used to split ortholinear keyboards already, so for me it wasn't all that steep. YMMV though, if you don't already have experience with a similar style of keyboard it might take longer.

I think for me it helped that none of the keys are odd shapes and sizes too. The arrow keys for example are the same size as all the others, unlike some (even larger!) laptops.

I bought a ZSA Moonlander and have a poor on-and-off-again relationship with it. However, the smaller ortho on the MNT Pocket was easier for me to use and I am not a great typist. Unfortunately the small screen of the Pocket at this stage in life is a bit of a strain to use for long periods so I wind up using my surface or X1 carbon when not at my PC.

Thank you for sharing your personal experience!

I often think "I should get me one of those" (MNT Pocket, or similar form-factor), but with my visual acuity getting worse (got my reading glasses in the past year), my X1 carbon might just remain my mainstay.

For me it was a blast. You just gotta embrace it. I can go back to a staggered board, no problem, but I prefer to use a Planck-like 47-key layout. If nothing else it's just more fun. Put a lot of thought into your layout and don't be afraid to scrap it all and start over.

Their section on Plan 9:

https://sdf.org/plan9/

Side note: here's my workflow for running Plan 9 on Windows:

https://youtu.be/IzEa2L_Pgw0?si=unM5l2-_i_g-NYKP

The ADA compiler for OpenVMS was over $200,000 in the 1990s.

Probably because only defense contractors used it. Now imagine that kind of gouging occuring for everything else they spend money on.

Ada was designed to solve different problems in harsher environments than other PLs at the time. Mostly, it was designed for the defense and aeronautics industries and had to compete against other PL designs to become a govt standard, similar to how weapons of war are developed and chosen. Think developing for hardcore code audits. There is no way the language could check all the boxes and remain compatible with, say, Pascal or Modula syntax.

I've been messing around with a computer algebra simplifier in Lean:

https://github.com/dharmatech/symbolism.lean

Lean is astonishingly expressive.