Centralization broke community on the Internet. We're here to fix it.
Centralized social media is harmful to society. We are building a gatekeeper-free decentralized system. Our mission is “social media done right”, to put people in control of their own identity and build the technology that would enable a shift to collaborative and intentional security models prioritizing active consent. To accomplish this, we will build a new architecture for the internet: removing the necessity of client-server architecture, replacing it with a participatory peer-centric model.
This is the home of the Spritely Goblins Distributed Programming platform - the core of our vision of a completely decentralised social internet.
Spritely’s technology is being released as free and open source software aiming for multiple programming language implementations and eventual open standardization. All of our work, ranging from decentralized identity, peer-to-peer user agents, decentralized social networks, encrypted and portable storage, and distributed object programming infrastructure is being built to enable a gatekeeper-free path where users and content are not tied to a specific server.
Re-Architecting Communication on the Internet
Every community (context) needs its own rules of identity, language, and behavior - so universal moderation is not possible. Privacy & moderation issues have triggered the permanent shutdown of millions of networked communities and the destruction of their relationships and artifacts.
Networked communities deserve the right to organize, govern, protect, and enrich their members themselves. This focus is why we are a nonprofit, public-benefit 501(c)(3) corporation.
The cofounders of Spritely Institute have been innovating on networked communities technologies and standards for decades, including the ActivityPub standard, social networks, smart contracts, object capabilities, and secure distributed virtual worlds.
We will lead creation of open standards and freely licensed open source reference implementations for safe, decentralized networked communities. A new social layer for the internet, with no gatekeepers - instead, people are in direct control of their identities and relationships.
Join us!
Much of foundational technology is bench-tested and we’ve built basic versions of many of the key components. We've started building a coalition because adding new infrastructure to the internet is a huge undertaking requiring substantial resources and cooperative developer effort.
Want to work together? Contact us at: contact@spritely.institute
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✩ News! ✩
Growing a Networked Garden with Spritely Goblins
Fri 16 December 2022Hello! This is David Thompson, Spritely Institute’s new Core Infrastructure Architect! I’m writing this post on a Friday, at the end of my first week here, to share my experience with Spritely Goblins so far. My goal for this week was to learn as much as I could about actors, object capabilities, and the Goblins API in order to create a small demo program to demonstrate my progress. I had my work cut out for me because, although I'm very comfortable with Scheme and functional programming, the domain of object capability security is one in which I have no prior experience (aside from studying and providing feedback on The Heart of Spritely before I joined!)
Two petnames papers are released!
Wed 26 October 2022Unique decentralized identifiers present significant human interface challenges. We begin to address these with two research papers exploring petnames, self-proclaimed names, and edge names.
We are hiring!
Thu 20 October 2022We're hiring: Operations Specialist / Bookkeeper & Core Infrastructure Architect
NLnet grant bootstraps OCapN protocol standardization effort!
Wed 19 October 2022Blast off! A tour of Spritely Institute's tech
Wed 17 August 2022Greetings! Now that we’ve announced the FFDW grant, things are getting serious over here at Spritely Networked Communities Institute (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.) Which means it’s time to talk about our technology!
FFDW Grant & DWebCamp: our decentralized community industry debut
Wed 17 August 2022Ein Scheme-Primer
SNCI CTO interviewed @RadicalXChange podcast
Thu 21 July 2022RadicalxChange(s) latest episode is an in-depth interview with our CTO, Christine Lemmer-Webber. There is a lot of conceptual territory covered in this discussion, with a focus on our work at Spritely Institute starting at 47:15.
Spritely Institute publishes a Scheme Primer
Wed 06 July 2022We are pleased to announce that we have published a new Scheme Primer! (PDF) (source) We primarily wrote this for the benefit of people approaching Spritely's technology who were unfamiliar with Scheme, but since the lack of a good Scheme introductory document is a common complaint, we hope this is a useful contribution in general and a gift to the wider programming language community.
Heart of Spritely whitepaper early draft released!
Fri 24 June 2022We now have a rough draft of our whitepaper, The Heart of Spritely: Distributed Objects and Capability Security! (PDF) (ODT) (ORG)