Spritely launches Supporter Drive
Here at Spritely, we're building the future of decentralized networking technology for social networks and other applications!
✩ Let's Take Back The Net! ✩
Spritely is building the next generation of decentralized networking technology.
We deserve social networks which respect our agency and autonomy. Communities deserve the right to organize, govern, and protect and enrich their members. All of these are natural outgrowths of applying the principles of fundamental human rights to networked systems.
Spritely builds on our experience co-authoring ActivityPub, the largest decentralized social network on the web to date, while applying powerful ideas from object capability security research.
Better worlds await, because better worlds are possible. Let's build a healthier and safer network together!
Follow us: [fediverse] [bluesky]
IRC chat: #spritely on libera.chat
✩ About Our Tech ✩
It's hard to build the kind of vision Spritely is envisioning on top of contemporary tech. Because of this, Spritely is taking a multi-layer approach!
Goblins: distributed programming made fun
Goblins is the foundation of the rest of Spritely's tech and makes building distributed and capability-secure programs easy and fun:
- Easy and secure networked programming: Programs you write in Goblins automatically are ready to work over the network and Goblins' security model looks like ordinary programming.
- Automatic persistence: Goblins comes with a persistence framework so you can focus on writing out your programs; most of the time, Goblins can take care of the rest of saving data to storage for you!
- Transactions: Goblins is fully and automatically locally transactional: state changes are rolled back automatically upon error at no extra cost.
- Time traveling debugger: Goblins' time traveling debugger lets you debug your program in the state that it was in when the error occured, and can even create visualizations of what created the problem! Only keep as much history as you need: Goblins is happy to clean up any state not needed for debugging!
- And much more! Goblins supports distributed garbage collection, promise pipelining for efficient networked communication, a standard library of common actor types, and much more!
Hoot: Scheme to WebAssembly
Hoot is Spritely's Scheme-to-WebAssembly compiler and all-around WebAssembly toolkit. Hoot was designed to allow Spritely's tools to run in the browser and reach a wider audience. However Hoot is generally powerful and useful for building Scheme projects on the web.
But that's not all! In addition to being a Scheme-to-WebAssembly compiler, Hoot also features WebAssembly assembler and disassembler tools... and even a WebAssembly interpreter for developers! If you're thinking of making your own custom WebAssembly language or even just want to learn how WebAssembly works, Hoot might be just what you want!
OCapN: the Object Capability Network
OCapN, the Object Capability Network, is the suite of protocols that gives Goblins its networked programming superpowers. OCapN's CapTP gives fine-grained capability programming over the network, distributed garbage collection, promise pipelining to avoid extra network round-trips, and introductions and smooth communication between peers as appropriate. OCapN's netlayers allow layering OCapN to run on top of a variety of network substrates including Tor Onion Services, libp2p, TCP+TLS, and perhaps some day carrier pigeons wearing encrypted microsd card backpacks.
OCapN's proto-standardization efforts are a joint project between multiple groups such as Spritely, Agoric, Metamask, and Sandstorm. Spritely took leadership in drafting the first versions of OCapN's specifications, extrapolating first from Goblins' implementation of the protocol, then working to bridge across the protocol needs of the participants of the group. OCapN builds on a long history of networked capability research, most prominently from the E programming language.
✩ Read our Whitepapers ✩
The Spritely Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and research institution built to develop new technologies for the decentralized web. All code we release is free and open source software and all papers we write are open access under free cultural licenses.
Our papers:
✩ News! ✩
Make a game with Hoot for the Autumn Lisp Game Jam!
Hi everyone, it's that time of year again: the Autumn Lisp Game Jam is upon us!
Our first office hours: A recap (and how to join the next one)
In mid-September, the Spritely Institute held our first open office hours event. 🎉
Spritely went to DWeb Camp: 2024 Recap
Spritely Goblins v0.14.0: libp2p and Improved Persistence
Come work with us! Hiring a Technical Administrator
Guile Hoot v0.5.0 released!
Announcing Spritely Office Hours!
Spritely goes to DWeb Camp
Cirkoban: Sokoban meets cellular automata written in Scheme
Last week, we released a small puzzle game called Cirkoban. Cirkoban is the very first publicly accessible application developed by Spritely that features the Goblins distributed programming library running in web browsers. We bet big on Hoot, our Scheme-to-WebAssembly compiler, a little over a year ago in order to bring Goblins to the web. That bet is starting to pay off! In this post, we’ll talk in detail about how we made Cirkoban and how it showcases Spritely technology.