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!
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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 is the foundation of the rest of Spritely's tech and makes building distributed and capability-secure programs easy and fun:
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, 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.
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.
A primer for the Scheme family of programming lanuages. It was originally written to aid newcomers to technology being developed at The Spritely Institute, but it is designed to be general enough to be readable by anyone who is interested in Scheme.
Formats: html | pdf | orgThis paper details the core technical toolbox provided by Spritely Goblins and how it supplies the necessary features to make building peer-to-peer applications as natural as any other programming model.
Formats: html | scheme pdf | wisp pdf | orgNames must be human-readable in order to be widely used. Unfortunately, while DIDs and Tor .onion addresses are decentralized and globally unique, they are not human readable. How can we build user interfaces that real users might actually use? In this paper we provide an overview of petname systems, a way of mapping human readable names to cryptographically secure names.
Formats: html | pdf | orgIn this paper, which builds off of the Petnames paper, we present our experiences from implementing a petname system for an existing chat application. We introduce the necessary mechanisms to retroactively introduce a petname system, the solutions provided, and future expected work.
Formats: html | pdf | orgThis paper presents an example implementation of a way for programs to describe themselves to each other and to users in a decentralized system. Making use of a simple petname system, content-addressed descriptors and interfaces can allow multiple parties to agree on what a particular term means without prior context. This understanding can be distributed without a centralized naming authority. This paper also describes some of the necessary design considerations when using CADs in a mutually suspicious network.
Formats: html | pdf | orgThe Spritely team is overjoyed by the support we've received in our first ever supporter drive. More than just donations, these are individual voices which inspire us to deliver on our promise of a more secure future.
We are happy to announce the release of Goblins 0.15.1! This patch release includes many bug fixes, documentation fixes, and quality-of-life improvements made since the 0.15.0 release back in January.
Later this month, the entire development team at Spritely will be heading to Brussels to attend Guix Days and FOSDEM! We are all excited to take part in these conferences. They are a great opportunity for networking and sharing ideas, and I fully expect it will be a lovely time as well.
Over the weekend Spritely marked a major milestone: we reached our goal for our very first supporter drive! With your help we managed to surpass our $80,000 USD goal with three weeks to go!
Here at Spritely, we're building the future of decentralized networking technology for social networks and other applications!
Hi everyone, it's that time of year again: the Autumn Lisp Game Jam is upon us!
In mid-September, the Spritely Institute held our first open office hours event. 🎉
