Spritely website launches!

-- Tue 29 September 2020

Whew, we're happy to finally say that https://spritelyproject.org/ exists and is up and running! (Well, supposedly you know because you're looking at it right now!)

Spritely was initially vaguely announced in an interview over at We Distribute about two and a half years ago, not long after ActivityPub became a W3C Recommendation. Not long after I made a similar announcement on my blog, followed quickly by the announcement of Spritely's first (and most foundational) subproject, Spritely Goblins. Development on Goblins proceeded at a quick pace, and the first demos of how Spritely's encrypted portable storage layer (Porta-Bella) followed quickly after.

So why then did it take so long to make and announce a website? Quite simply, it's because I wasn't ready to make this a community project quite yet because there were too many ideas that were outside the mainstream. It turns out that Spritely isn't doing many things that are new, but it is doing many things that are relatively unknown, and at the start, even I didn't fully understand them. Thanks to the help of the object capability security community, I gained enough knowledge and confidence where I now have a pretty good idea how each layer works. (Spritely's goals simply can't be achieved in anything other than an object capability architecture.) I wanted to be confident that we could do everything we were claiming we would before making bold claims in a very public way.

Furthermore, I needed to get the foundational layers down enough where I could invite others to start experimenting and building. Now that Spritely Goblins has the beginnings of support for distributed networked programming, I think that we're finally at that point.

There's a lot more to do... we've really just gotten started. As Spritely's subtitle goes, "Social Worlds Await"... but only if we make them happen... back to work!