 This is the Fellowship of the Link on Wednesday, May 24th, 2023. And what fellowshipy things are in the air? I've got one. Shoot. I'm sending Bentley a message right now. Fellowship of the Link is starting right now. It's this time every Wednesday and covers wikis and such not. Bentley Davis, who is friend to some of us, is looking for a new way to host his website. And so he's looking at static site generators and he ended up bouncing around and looking at massive wiki. So he's kind of a massive wiki builder and 11T. And we had a good chat this morning about massive wiki and massive wiki builder and Bentley's project. It sounds like he can kind of fold what he's doing into the massive wiki umbrella, which makes sense because he's interested in markdown and links and things like that. He's got a little bit different. One of his wishes was that as he makes a blog post, it would be nice if he could put the image files right next to the blog post so that you could grab a whole directory and put it someplace else as a nugget. The massive wiki builder lets you do that, no problem. But the ones that we've built so far, we tend to put the images all in a directory called underscore attachments or underscore images just to keep them out of the way of the files, the MD files that you're usually looking at in obsidian. But there's no reason that you have to do it that way. So Bentley's way to do it would be perfectly fine too and useful when you're making nuggets. So anyway, out of that conversation today on massive wiki Wednesday, Bentley's suggestion was how about if we come up with a table of what we think are the core features of a builder of massive wikis. And then as he works and we work, we can kind of keep them synced up or at least know that we might be diverging and should talk or something like that. So we're starting a table of here's what it means to be building massive wikis. You have to use markdown files, you have to use files, you have to use markdown files, you should build the whole repo kind of irregardless of directories. A lot of static site generators have specific ideas of how you need to set up their file hierarchy and massive wiki builders more agnostic about that. So on and so forth. Yeah, I imagine that's probably why he used 11 t because it's probably the most neutral in that regard. Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at his repos browsing it on matter most. And I think that's really cool. I think that's a good idea. A lot of the massive wiki stuff is great, but yeah, I agree that it'd be nice to have Sort of the build task be something be handled by something that's more commonly and broadly supported, as opposed to relying on you guys to maintain your own specific build process. Yep. He came up with he convergently came up with an idea that I had as well which is to kind of dynamically render a massive wiki directly out of the GitHub repo. Rather than going through a build process and having a static website. So that's another kind of outcome of brainstorming. Yeah, I'd be like, you could just have a GitHub action that builds every time because it's not hard. We, we have that actually with massive wiki builder, but this is something different where you run a client in the front in the in the web browser. So you think you're looking at, you know, it doesn't really matter a static website or a dynamic wiki or whatever, whatever you think it is, but it looks like a website. In the back end, it's actually using GitHub is kind of a file system. So that means that's hard to like, make SEO compatible. Yeah, it, it would be compatible with the way we do massive wiki builder right now. And it would also be any, anybody who has a folder of, you know, Docs folder with markdown files, you know, anywhere in GitHub is all of a sudden something like a massive wiki without having to build it without having to ask them without having to, you know, get them to figure out what massive wiki builder is or figure out how to install Python or, or node or whatever. It just works. So it feels like sometimes I'm routed to a file on GitHub, at least that's what the URL looks like. And when I get there, it looks like a web page. It looks like actually a functioning documents and all that. What am I hitting there? You're probably hitting GitHub pages, which is their version of static hosting. Okay. And that's, it's a GitHub offer that is. Yeah, it's, it's kind of integrated with, with the repo and kind of not at least last time I left it uses a separate. Sorry, Chris, it's always fun to see you. Yeah, even though you have to struggle with every single time. So it's, it's kind of integrated with your repo. It's usually a separate branch. So it's almost, almost like a separate repo in a way. But it's basically like lowest tier free host state that is really sort of optimized for static sites. And it's based on Jekyll, I think. So Jekyll is just a default configuration, but like all the 11 t sites I've shared here, context center, all of that. That's all GitHub pages using a build task with 11 t, though you could use any static site. So all it needs is to output HTML at the end. The Jekyll thing is kind of the equivalent of Massive Wookie Builder and GitHub pages as an infrastructure is our equivalent, what we use Netlify for. And what is 11 t adding to the solution? It's another builder like Jekyll or Massive Wookie Builder. Okay. And so none of what we've talked about thus far would make Massive Wookie more of a wiki by which I mean editable in place with concurrent writers. So the codename for the way I've thought of that front end thing is Zircon. So I'll say Zircon. With Zircon, there's an idea that just like an old style wiki, there's an edit button, edit this page button. And you can actually feel like you're editing the wiki. You are editing the wiki, but it slips the page into edit mode. You type stuff, you click save, and it updates the GitHub repo back in. But it's not doing concurrent, is it doing record locking or is it doing any kind of... It would probably be last set of wins. Okay. And there's another wrinkle, which is Pete, you didn't talk about authentication in. So there would be kind of an anonymous mode where somebody gives you that browser Zircon embeds their authorization to edit GitHub stuff. I guess you have to integrate that with the person who owns the wiki. Or you can get something fancy and do fork and polls or there's a lot of... Or you could use your own GitHub credentials. There's the authentication Pete that kind of glossed over it and it gets more interesting fast. Is this the same thing you were calling Zirconia before? Yes. Okay. And that's complementary or different from Opal? Different. Okay. In ways I don't really understand. So Opal was the idea that we could use something like Electron. It would probably be something else now to make obsidian light and with it integrated. Instead of having a separate plug-in for Git with arcane buttons and stuff like that, we would make it streamlined for massive wiki use with Git under the head. So much simpler version of obsidian without all the bells and whistles and extra features and plug-in capability and stuff like that. Gotcha. And do any of these things play nice with operational transformation or CRDTs or anything that makes concurrence work better? Excellent question. They're kind of disjoint. You could put them together and you don't have to. I was wondering actually in the call today if we could make a line-oriented CRDT to replace Git, that would be awesome. Huh. Okay. And then I will say that Rich Burden's system is built on Echo, which is the eventually consistent hierarchical object database, which is based on CRDT. That's an aspect of DXOS. Is there a link to that? That he's already built. Yes. Well, let me give you, I don't know that I have a link to Echo, but I have a link to DXOS, which is his project. And it's got a lot of docs, I think. A lot of docs. This is, I don't know, that's the URL I get Echo from, but actually maybe it's, yeah, I guess that works. Echo Halo on Cube. Yeah. And a lot of, and I think a bunch of this is a working platform that he's got going, and I'm trying to get him to come demo. I'm actually not good at tracking people down and shepherding them into the conversations, but I'd like him to present what he's got to either the free to his brain call or here at the fellowship. I've got an oddball wish, which I live in a community where I participate in a community where somebody is super excited about Spatial Web. It's called, which is, it seems to me like it's overlapping a bit with DXOS or SOLID or IPFS. In a way, in a way it doesn't. Yeah. I think Spatial Web is obsessed with geolocation in a bad way, and that detracts from everything they may be trying to do as far as I'm concerned. Everything has a physical location. Shouldn't you be able to reference it? Not really. I have significant problems with Spatial Web. For me, I've set it aside out of the range of candidates for what the next platform could be. In the community I'm in, there's a strong champion who's going to continue to bring it up until we all are living in the Spatial Web or until we've convinced them that it's not what he thinks it is. Yep. Totally understand. Is the Spatial Web something you guys are familiar with? Have you heard of it? We'll put some links in the chat. Yeah, I'm not familiar with it. The idea there's two main things, HTSP I think and H... HSML? HSML and HTSP, I'll put the link. With the amazing powers of those two IEEE standards, there are standard track IEEE things, which means they're blessed and amazing and wonderful. Sorry, I shouldn't be snarky. IEEE does many wonderful things. I was appreciating the snark. I appreciate 802.3 and 802.11. And probably many other IEEE things that I don't even know they exist. But anyway, the idea is between HSML and HSTP, we have all the tools that we need to specify all the things, to have all the things interoperate. IoT, AR, VR, data. They're even kind of subsuming one of the languages like Lexon. I don't think it's Lexon that they're using that is both machine readable and also code. Sorry, machine readable and human readable. Interesting. And maybe I'm all wrong about this and the special one is the one that wins. Yeah, who knows. It's a toothpaste. Did you all read the article about Ron Popiel many years ago? I think it was titled The Pitch Man. It rings a bell. So, do you know about Ron Popiel? If you watched late night TV, you would have seen his pitches. He was like, here's The Pitch Man. I've got it. It's yet another Malcolm Gladwell article, but he was one of the original dudes who'd stand by the side of the road and sell you a potato peeler that was better than everybody else's potato peeler, except he would invent a bunch of his stuff. And I hope that link still works. I didn't test the link right now because Gladwell moves his archive. It actually goes to the Barbara Maffee right now. Oh, good. Anyway, Popiel was like a genius of selling stuff and then inventing stuff that people would just go by and spend some money on, but he could convince you of it. He was like a fabulous stand-up pitchman and tireless. Absolutely tireless. Sorry for the distraction. We now return to our regularly scheduled program, which was already in progress. Michael, nice to see you. We were talking about Massive Wiki Futures and projects for building site generators, a project called Zircon in Pete's nomenclature for Massive Wiki at this point and how that fits with the constellations of stuff that we're talking about. Any other fellowshipy kind of things going on in people's heads? Chris, what have you been up to? I haven't been thrown for a loop with some family health if he's late. Oh, sorry. Eating up a lot of time and now we're just trying to make it to the end of the school year with the 12-year-old. So we can actually go see the family often. How many weeks left in the school year and yours? I have a week and a half. Oh, good. Maybe tops. I haven't been keeping that. There's some interesting stuff I've seen but I'll have to process it before I can. Yep. I thought... Sorry. Go ahead, Arm. I was going to say, I thought some of the blue sky stuff has been pretty interesting. They open-sourced their actual app, their web app, and they open-sourced their algorithm with the idea that anyone could build a blue sky app that interacts with the spec, that interacts with the stream and gets a different version of suggestions and algorithms. I thought it was really interesting to watch. I haven't had time to play with it, but in terms of social networks, I feel like this is the best practice. I think we're never going to go away from the idea that people want algorithms to decide what they see in social networks because there's too much stuff, but being able to see what the algorithm is that's actually live, unlike Twitter's, which is just a released version, and then being able to create situations where you can sub in your own algorithm based on what you build yourself is something really cool. Blue sky has been very interesting personally to me, both because of the technical spec, but also because I think they're doing the right stuff, and that's pretty interesting to see because I can't think of the last time I saw an entity of that type doing the right stuff. Will they get the sociology and adoption right? I don't know. That's the big theory, right? The question of if you do all the right stuff, does the community form itself into the right shape? And they're betting, yeah, you do all the right stuff, you get the right community. I'm not so sure, but hey, they're giving up, they're opening up a lot of tools that people can try to approach this problem with, which I think is exciting. I mean, look, it's the best you're going to get out of a company run by Jack Dorsey in Silicon Valley, et cetera, et cetera, right? Is it open source? Yeah, yeah. So if they're not doing it right, somebody might do it right. Exactly. Exactly. Might do it right for them or might do it right as themselves. I think it's... Does anybody remember Orchid? Raise your hand if you remember Orchid. Take a picture of the Orchid license plate. Oh, nice. And just apropos what you were saying, Pete, about which way might it go, but Orchid became like a Brazilian hotbed because a whole bunch of... I've forgotten who it was, somebody we know, a social media maven went down to Brazil with a whole bunch of logins or whatever and convinced everybody to get on Orchid. And it worked. Orchid suddenly became like the Brazilian hangout and everybody else dropped off. That was from 2004. Kind of like adopting Bitcoin, but it went right. Yeah. So if you were running Blue Sky, what would you do to track better? Yeah, right now, I think, you know, it's very difficult to know what I would do better than what Facebook is doing. Sorry, than what Blue Sky is doing. Funny slip. Yeah, Facebook is doing everything. But they're on my brain because of a variety of other problems. Yeah, here, I'll share the links here. Let's see. I mean, like, if you're going to do this thing and the way you're going to do this thing, I think this is the best way to do it. And, like, outside of that, I don't know what to do without driving deeper into the code, which I just have not had time to do. I thought this was really cool. Somebody used the open source stuff to create Blue Sky as an IRC window. That's the last link in there. That's funny. Yeah. I have to say, if I think back in history, doing the tech right isn't the part that made the community right. Yeah. And a good example of community done right was Flickr. And they did a lot of cool things with ATT&CK. And they were gentle but effective community moderators. But I think the thing that really kickstarted Flickr was the fact that they had a built-in preset community of people waiting for Game Never Ending. So they were all people who were there for fun. They were all people who were there for engagement with other people. And they were waiting for just the platform to do it. And then Flickr ended up being the platform that they were on to do it. And the early days of Flickr, it was a bunch of people having fun together and subverting the tech, actually, often. Doing the wrong things with the tech, doing playful things with the tech. Same thing with Twitter. A bunch of the cool stuff from Twitter, the hashtags, the real version of RTs, all that kind of stuff, the ats, the ats. That was all inventions, playful inventions by people on the platform that it wasn't... The name Tweet. The name Tweet. And by the way, Game Never Ending was created by the same company, Ludicorp. As Flickr. Yeah, Flickr was the failure of Game Never Ending. Yeah, exactly. And Katerina Fake. And Katerina, yeah. People love to mention Stewart without mentioning Katerina. Katerina was critical. As were... I've forgotten the name, there were a couple other community people. I remember George Oates was key. She's an engineer, but she does really good engineering and social engineering. And Sylvaini was there. All Lord. And there were so many individual communities that were there. Yeah. That existed in adjacent ways and probably still do. It's sort of one of the flaws of the way social media systems are set up that you can't... It's like unless somebody has a site that has a little button for all the platforms that are active on, there's very little connective memory which is something like Activity Pub or Blue Sky or... I mean, the idea that... I assume you could do this on Activity... on Blue Sky too, but the idea that with Activity Pub you can be... like in one... in one stream as one user, you can be following the YouTube analog and the Instagram analog and the Twitter analog of a certain subject. I mean, it's not there yet for sure, but that sort of cross-platform, cross-medium aspect seems like something to work for. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of an Activity Pub thing. Right? Using Activity Pub, you can subscribe to Activity Pub, Twitter, Activity Pub, Flickr, all that stuff. Right. Yeah. You have to do it. I mean, the one thing that I still think is missing, again, you know, I've said this to you before, sort of went too far in building factor on this quest, but the idea that you want to isolate, yes, you can follow all those things from the user, but unless you create different user identities, you can't compartmentalize the following on the experience. Like, you can put them all together, but you can't pull them, tease them apart by subject matter so easily in one identity. Yeah. I mean, I think, like, to what we said earlier, the core of these things is like to surround with them and use them in ways that they are not intended to use is how these things are best built, and as they become more and more restrictive, the ability to use the platform is less and less effective for that type of good communities. Trying to find the blog post about this, but like, there's a concept about this in digital humanities back when I worked in academia and worked with folks like that. We're like, ah, yeah, deformation, right? The idea that you should be deforming the platforms and the systems you use in order to make them into a thing that is effective for you. Yeah. Here we go. I found the blog post that I remembered. Um, I'm going to make a note of this. I think, like, that's the reason why I've sort of I mean, mastered on an activity pub to I think are in this category, right? But I don't know. I have, like, technical issues of the activity pub protocol that make it a little difficult for me to see it being that. I think you still need these big you either need, like, single person, you either need to be hosted on your own thing for yourself or you need to be on something that's broader than yourself to really get the most out of activity pub. There's really any, like, it's very difficult to see activity pub as a hobbyist specification in the way that, like, that's what makes HTML and that version of the flat web for lack of a better term useful and great and, like, it seems to me like Blue Sky is moving in that direction, but I honestly am not sure, right? It's very, very early. It's just the things that make me sit up and pay attention it's been doing. I'm done. Go ahead. I wanted to, maybe this will be a little bit controversial, but that's one of the things I like about Nostar is it feels like like easily deformable and a little bit of discussion with a friend, John Abbey also made me think, I guess this is another discussion I've had somewhere else too, but one of the accidental things that I think is really cool about Nostar is they replicated the RFC style and let's make standards, but none of the standards although the standards are optional it's the ones that succeed and get used that actually define what you need. So, IETF work that way kind of like Python perhaps work that way. So, by contrast I tuted this a little bit on Macedon. The Macedon innovation thing and the community thing it's really squashed. I don't know so much about Activity Pub, but it does look like kind of a hairball to play with rather than Nostar ended up being this composable thing where you to make a client you end up doing 6 or 10 or 12 of the nips they call Nostar Improvement Protocols or whatever. Together the different clients and servers and stuff are competing based on fitness and if there's a new modular component that comes up say micropayments somebody will implement it and then their users will say wow this is super fun to use and then other clients will pick it up and implement it and so you get this nice marketplace of ideas and iterative development and composability, deformability is built into the the community and the use of it. Yeah, I mean I think that Nostar is really interesting too. I think that I was very hesitant of it initially but I am sort of moving more in its favor because I am like I said I am very interested in it conceptually. I think it's still pretty narrow for what it intent like it has a very narrow thing that it is intending to do but I think that's fine. Like it's good we don't need everything to do everything and that is great. It's very narrow for what it wants to do. It's very narrowly wants to do a specific thing but for that thing I think it's I am more positive on it than I was before and I like like I like the idea of it right this sort of very unanchored standard right where you do things and the standard does not require allegiance to a particular domain in order to use it and I like the the idea of the delay friendliness. I don't know if I think we might have discussed this before but have you all seen the website that's like solar powered where it just sort of turns off when there's not enough sun somehow. Everybody is curious about that though. Yeah here it is low tech magazine is what it's called let me share this in the chat so like I think conceptually like this is a really cool idea right like you build the website with the idea that it has accessible like accessing it as a non-urgent affair right it's not going to be the same for every single website but for websites like this the systems like NOSTA are arguably for systems much larger or anything right like the always on is something we just assumed needed to be the case but it's fine right like you get a link and you go to it and it's there's actually a discussion about like an HTTP code for you know site is down because it's unpowered at this moment right it's down because it's unpowered for this moment you save the link and some link saving tool and you come back to it later and that's fine right and I'd like the idea of NOSTA which is sort of similar which is you can have a system that's offline for a while and that comes back online it sends in it and it receives and then it can go back offline and I think I don't know if NOSTA is the best for this right like I'm just I haven't had time there either to go deep into the technical nature of it but I think like conceptually yeah Chris to your point like this idea of systems that are progressively enhanced that treat always on is something that doesn't need to be the case I think there is a really solid concept in there and like the idea that coming back to us right like the idea of note systems that where the notes share with each other and you can retrieve notes from another system and save them in your own system and that is also attached to something that is local to your machine I think like that is part of that concept I really know what what it's called or if there's a word for it but I really like that idea and I like how I like the opportunity and the idea of it and I think there's more there that can be used it's awesome thanks wanted to say hi to Bentley hi Bentley hi Bentley I don't know if you've been here before Bentley I apologize maybe I covered some of massive wiki 11d builder stuff and talked about that that's cool you're fully informed representative wiki builder 11d nope I'm just popping in I'll have to leave early but see if I can provide any value to the discussion yeah by the way real quick that looks great I'm highly positive of it I like that idea a lot so another thing that I wish I had more time to look at but I'm hoping I can take a look at what you're working on maybe try it out for myself at some point because I think that's a great idea Aaron's limited massive wiki and in 11d awesome yeah as well as many other things I'm also kind of abstracting some of the code outside of 11d so so Pete and I can share among our builders if we want so that'll be interesting what else is interesting you know played with played with mem much what is that mem it's a Rome like note taker yeah sorta or not I haven't played with it much but it looks interesting and I was it has the single player mode aspects that single player mode coupled with ability to share community and I was wondering before I spent a lot of time with it whether anybody else had the other thing that I'm tracking that I actually haven't gotten access to because it just came out is a board I don't know if you are any of you familiar with post light studios in New York who so Paul Ford and Ricciotti left sold I think they sold post light to its employees or something nice like that and left and set up a consultancy and then they just came out with a product called a board that is basically kind of kills me because it's like exactly the MVP of factor that we should have just released with and they did and it's it's you know you can sign up for the list and it's you know they're inviting people over I mean they launched it like two days ago but it's basically a thing for you to save links as cards put them in stacks and and then share them and comment on them and then you know it's a lot like factor without the RSS feeds and the more complex stuff and knowing what I know about them and how they build I'm inclined to think it's going to be not bad and it's I think they have a it might just be a board com yeah it is and you know it doesn't look like they're being very ambitious about it which is cool though I don't think they're open source which is too bad or built on Blue Sky or Activity Pub or anything else like that while we're mentioning things like them and a board and factor I wanted to throw my hub in there my hub is by Matthew Lowry and it's it's another bookmarker thingy and if anybody wants wants an account he'll give you an account it's kind of in free preview and it may or may not go someplace we'll see yeah I mean I've played with it a teeny tiny bit I mean I've got an account but it seems intriguing and I just find myself wishing we had a structure to just mash our stuff together and you know make something that works for different kinds of people because a lot of the things along those lines and I think my hub is a little like that seem a little bit complicated for a consumer but you know but cool for everybody here and like having different gradations of stuff that's meant to be for the simplest of consumers and tracks into this I mean you and I have been in conversations where this came up before about the sort of Trello what is it Trello I always forget the intermediate one on up to now I'm forgetting the more advanced one the one that we're using in the NSF no not it's a sauna yeah and they're all a sauna products but there's an intermediate one that's sort of like for to-do list but more complicated than Trello and they're all you know they all have portability between them because they're all from the same Uber company anyway as far as I know as far as I know Trello is at Lassian at Lassian right and then Lassian has Jira yeah right Trello, Jira and a sauna and there's a sauna a Lassian too they've been buying up stuff they bought Trello Trello existed and then they bought it which made sense because it was sort of the like easy on ramp to the other stuff and I like that I mean as a corporation it's a good strategy but in thinking about how we do this viably and make the Uber cool product for the people who are sophisticated enough to use it but also have the entry you know the on ramp I think there's something there yeah agreed a quick question is a board like a browser? a board is I mean I haven't got my hands on it yet on the waiting list I should they said within a couple of days it is a browser extension that turns anything and I think you can also if it's like factor I think you can also just make a note be a card but the browser extension turns any site any link into a card and this exists in browser but you know you have these stacks of cards that are either yours alone on a certain subject and you can also make cards for things that are on your hard drive I believe I'll know better once I played with it but they talked about it on their podcast a little bit and you know the last two Zaudience Ford podcasts have been on the subject and if you've ever listened to their podcasts you know they're kind of adorably banter-y but there is some information in there that's interesting yeah I've liked all of Ford's previous work so yeah interesting well I signed up and maybe I'll get it access at some point so I can't we were saying that at last I'm seeing no proof of that well let's look at Atlassian and their product offerings because that'll tell you I'm pretty sure they're like three or four and I thought Asana might be one of them pretty sure yeah I don't think so products I don't know yeah it's Confluent Asana is still independent I was trained independently I also really thought it was bought by Atlassian because they like it has that whole Atlassian look and I didn't think that Justin Rosenstein would sell to anybody like that I used to use Asana a lot when I was a freelancer I did like it as a project management tool it was always very interesting that it was like they basically just took out the version of project management they did at Facebook and turned it into a standalone product intriguing so I could bring up an old topic please we talked about kind of a centralized inbox and I can't remember who someone was saying that they want to they don't want everything in the same app because they would get all mixed up and I wanted to challenge that that framing because it's not the fact that they need to be in different apps to keep them straight but they need to be in separate buckets you need to have separation but I shouldn't that I communicate with some people through Slack and some people through Mattermost but every once in a while I have a community that's in both and I don't remember which one it was and if I could take this channel from Mattermost and this channel from Slack and put them in one central place in a separate bucket from everything else including emails, text everything Facebook whether it's legal or not because what I'm discussing is fatally illegal in several cases that's still kind of one of the side quests that I'm hoping for you ought to be able to own your tractor too but and your seeds it's interesting that I could have a communication with a friend and a friend can communicate with me but I'm not allowed to access that except through their predefined keyhole so it might be interesting to challenge that by building a system and then saying come and get me good pride for my cold dead hands the idea, I mean when you think about postal law and sorry some of you heard me say this before just that the idea that you aren't allowed to read your correspondence to and from somebody A, it's illegal for anybody to do anything with it well it's in that envelope and transit it's a federal crime for them to like record anything about it and you and the other person have complete access I mean putting aside the physical which piece of correspondence ends up where you have complete access to that independent of whether you use this post office or that post office and challenging that legally on that basis I think is a really really worthy thing I mean I've been in some other conversations with other people about that as a kind of non-partisan legislative fight worth having that all your communication and data belong to you high bar yeah so it'd be nice to have a little kind of standard system that allows you to scrape anything from anywhere and put it anywhere which I guess you can kind of do with you know you can hack it together with a camera or the name I mean if than that or it's many different replacements and newer versions you can hack something but to make something kind of more like more muggle friendly so a couple things I one of my pet peeves of the modern communication environment is when messaging happens everywhere and there's no unified search for where the hell the thing happened and I don't remember which Slack channel it was in or if it was a LinkedIn message I'm totally lost things are just hiding all over the place and it's very hard to find them so that problem is huge for me I totally agree I might be able to back into where you're going Bentley I don't know have you heard me describe link keto before not up keto but link keto I might have mentioned it briefly a long time ago I realized I was using eight different word processors on any given day and at that time it would have been outlook word, power point, word press and a couple other things and I'm like and they all had a different command for how you embed a link and whatever what if you could take your favorite text processor and pop it out of the interface and teach it how to push and pull files to any of those devices in the right format appropriate for that device so I'm a known editor and if it was emacs let's pretend I love emacs which I do not then my version of emacs would know how to push a blog post out onto wordpress onto the wordpress site and I wouldn't have to worry about the wordpress editor which is all kind of adapt and so you could then flip and sort of work through it there was an added piece of this I had link keto fast and slow which was I hate the notion that humans can't multitask I just saw a post about that this morning you know some humans are really good at it it might be just a switch or a variable and what if we all what if we optimized our tools for link keto slow was cover everything else distraction free deep focus in one thing link keto fast was how do I use this little pop-up editor to go do a whole lot of stuff in and and now I'm adding in features like oh I just got it I see this interesting post I know that I should repost this to two lists and forward it to two people with comments and how do I do that at super hyper speed oh I want to blog about this but not now later how do I put it in the queue for that oh I need to add this to my brain but how do I execute lots of different things on the flow that's coming at me all the time that was sort of link keto fast and last point the problem with pulling something out of slack as just a message or out of email or out of text is that I and I get so much knowledge from the context that each of these messages is in the tool it's in the previous messages the thread that's how I reload into my head what the hell was going on at the time so I find it hard to imagine a unified interface where those things would commingle gracefully and I would still be able to figure out what's going on and what it's going to look like when it goes back so that's a lot of stuff all at once but that's kind of where your idea takes me in response to that I think that that's the beauty of the card that is a link to the context that you want to be able to search and get the search result that says there is something from this person using that word that you searched on in this Slack conversation click go to that Slack conversation in that context it's not necessarily saying that everything you ever do is going to have to exist in this one app that this app is going to have this connective Mycelial to use your favorite Mycelia and then also so that kind of brings in really what this is getting to into your word processor thing is being able to have custom interfaces so separating the data from the interface which technically is extremely, extremely difficult and wrought with bugs but and potential exponential explosion of features and complications but that's not a reason not to do anything I mean we did eventually put someone on the moon and we're going to do it again click a little effort and we did get like freeze-dried ice cream out of that so yeah kind of this whole dismantling thing and I think search is an interesting use case and the other one is just custom algorithms so you have all the data from all the sources coming in and you choose how it represents and then having a public library of algorithms that people could share and you know that would be kind of the ultimate kind of ecosystem yeah that's that'd be fun to have maybe not fun to build well it's interesting because the more I mean I think back in that same conversation a piece of the linkage pitch was that the only difference between an email and a web page which is some variance of HTML is that one of them says where do I put this on the web it has a URL and the other one says who do I send this to it has an email address the rest is just a document made with the same piece parts exactly and maybe not precisely exactly but close enough for government work and so I realized that all these nuggets like that there isn't that much difference between a weblog and a wiki and something else because a weblog is just a sequence of pages that happen to be sorted in chron order with some header and footer material inserted awesome why those couldn't also be separate pages on a wiki I don't understand and that's part of my conversation for years now with Pete about like you know wikis and blogs and how all these things aren't they're different in how you manifest them and manifesting them differently makes them different tools gives you a different kind of rhetoric leverage rhythm all those kinds of things are cool but those are just variables to play with there isn't functionally that much difference between these things and so if we can simplify a little bit then the creation and curation of these things ought to be a lot easier than it is and there shouldn't be such a wide variety of crazy formats and tools