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Announcing Dipity! TL;DR, it's a bluetooth mesh chat app ...

2026-10-23T18:26:33Z

Announcing Dipity!

TL;DR, it's a bluetooth mesh chat app built for local communities, not protests. You can get it on zapstore, google play, and soon the apple store (Lord willing).

Last summer, I was sitting at a coffee shop chatting with a friend about creating a bluetooth mesh app, inspired by Manyverse (a scuttlebutt app). The local-first architecture is what originally got me interested in this whole space, and yet I'd never tried building on it.

Less than a week later, Bitchat came out, which took the wind out of my sails.

Since then, Bitchat has seen meteoric growth, topping app store charts and making international headlines. Which is great! But I also have a few problems with it.

First, its primary metaphor is chat, which might be useful for some cases (like protests), but is near worthless for slower-paced async communication — think concert announcements, garage sales, lost and found, etc.

Second, it's vanilla nostr — messages are signed, and geohash rooms are accessible from anywhere. There are no real barriers to communication across space.

James Carey (no, not that one) talks in his book "Communication as Culture" about time-binding vs space-binding media. Time-binding media create continuity over time, while space-binding media create continuity over space. The trade-off of each is discontinuity over the other axis. We see this is the rise of "horizontal" identities (race, class, gender) over "vertical" identities (nationality, regionalism, home town pride) in tandem with the rise of space-binding media like the internet.

I want to see if I can fight the inherent tendencies of digital media to accelerate communication and erode local identities by using it in a new way.

Dipity is anti-efficient; it uses bluetooth and nostr with a new signature scheme to promote verifiability across only two hops. (In theory, this could be short circuited by placing a relay in between, or by passing along proofs, but assuming buy-in from users, the network can suppress illicit gossip.)

The goal of this is to create a local-only, human-scale gossip network that supports the formation of organic, rooted communities.

I don't know if this project will work, but I think it's interesting and worth a try.

Until the iOS version is out, I don't recommend trying to onboard your local community, since network effect is key (unless your locale uses Android exclusively). But please give it a try and let me know what you think!

https://zapstore.dev/apps/social.coracle.dipity

I'm sick. Please help. I just told my agent to "vibe ...

2026-10-15T23:25:23Z

I'm sick. Please help. I just told my agent to "vibe code" something.

I'm getting more done than ever, but pride in my work is at ...

2026-10-16T20:35:11Z

I'm getting more done than ever, but pride in my work is at an all-time low. The average quality of the work I do has improved dramatically over the last 6 months. Many of the engineering disciplines I neglected or never learned happen automatically now.

It used to be I would sweat to make something I was proud of, because I believed it was worthwhile to do so. The bad parts were bad, and many, but eclipsed by the purposefulness of the work that drove me to do it. And the good parts were good, because they were real — because I cared enough to discover them.

I'm not espousing the labor theory of value. I'm not talking about some essential, ineffable "good" in craftsmanship. What I'm saying is that sweat is an essential ingredient in producing something with a soul: something that people can love. People don't love commodities, they love singular things. The commodification of software is killing the love of it.

In other words: other people loved the garbage I used to craft more than the garbage I now produce.

Nowadays, all the parts of my work that used to be low quality are high quality, because Claude is a better programmer than I am. But the parts of my work that used to be good haven't survived. I might be trying to do something worthwhile, but because I haven't actually engaged with the problem I can't make anything better than slop materialize. The glory has departed.

Flotilla has greatly profited from me using AI to code, because the good parts only I could build were already there, and there was a lot of bad stuff that needed to be fixed.

But the way I feel about other projects that I haven't gone through that journey with is that they are garbage. Total trash. They are as valuable as the tokens I used to generate them. Because there's nothing really there. There is nothing to love. There is nothing singular. They are disposable, fungible.

When people refer to themselves as "idea guys" it means they suck at doing real work. But their ideas can only exist if someone takes the time to make their ideas a reality. But in the New Age of AI, idea guys can finally realize their genius, without being held back by a bunch of narrow-minded technicians!

But I think it will turn out that there wasn't actually any genius there in the first place, and everything that was of value about the original idea was actually discovered during the process of building it by the people who did the work to make it a reality.

Software as an art, or a craft — as a thing which is an object affection — is dying. This is fine, the affection was probably misplaced in the first place. A new kind of software — the stuff we create for ourselves, that no one else will ever see — will probably absorb some of that affection. The rest will be commodified.

I think this goes for every industry, by the way. An accountant can feel proud of his spreadsheet, a plumber of his solder, a salesperson of his pitch, even a developer of his agent harness. He can love the work of his hands and have affection for it. It can be singularly valuable to someone, and a conduit of love between the people concerned.

Does an assembly line worker feel affection for the parts he stamps out, or the people who receive them? Is oil extracted with heart? Are the foundations of skyscrapers filled in with love? Does the dollar store worker bask in the sunshiny faces of the children purchasing their very own extruded plastic disposable pseudo toys?

Maybe they do. I do think that wherever humans use tools, there will be affection. It reminds me of the nose art pilots used to paint on their bombers. "This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine."

Maybe means I should buy a mechanical keyboard, I don't know. DAU and MRR probably engender warm fuzzies in some types of people, but I'm not one of them.

Commodities are not necessary for a good life. A community can live without commodities, and survive. If everything were hand-made, pride and affection would ubiquitous - and its absence would be traceable to a character flaw in the worker. If every meal came from an animal who had a name instead of a number, every meal would embody gratitude and grief like no store-bought meal could.

I yearn to live that life and check out of this Terry Gilliam-esque Hotel California life, I say as I glance out the side of my eyes at the people I know who have just bought a couple dairy cows and moved out to some acreage, and keep typing.

Am I a coward for wanting to stay where it's comfortable and secure? Where my skills (or what's left of them) are in demand? Is my heart too bound up with the bounty of the market that I have become a commodity myself?

Or am I a whiner for being so sad about losing the drudgery of programming? For not wanting to live on a diet of petrochemical-derived macro-nutrients? For not wanting to spend hours a week in a car driving to an office where I work by myself?

"Better a handful with quietness Than both hands full, together with toil and grasping for the wind."

Fresh off the presses: I wrote a new personal relay ...

2026-10-16T00:45:42Z

Fresh off the presses: I wrote a new personal relay implementation that will fix nostr.

Instead of syncing notes from your web of trust (expensive, no one is looking for them there) or blasting notes to the network (pointless, borderline abusive), it looks for your outbox relays and fetches your notes from them. This means that after years of home relay fragmentation you can finally get all your notes in one place. Even better, if you run two instances they will actively copy your notes between them without any configuration other than a normal 10002.

Use the outbox model. It works.

https://gitea.coracle.social/coracle/canoe

I messed up the joke by forgetting to post the picture ...

2026-10-16T00:36:11Z

I messed up the joke by forgetting to post the picture

quoting
nevent1q…6u0u
Whenever I go for a run I make sure to bring my electrolyte drink with me.

Whenever I go for a run I make sure to bring my electrolyte drink ...

2026-10-16T00:09:37Z

Whenever I go for a run I make sure to bring my electrolyte drink with me.

@nprofile…rtq4 armada's relay is prohibiting PoW on gift ...

2026-10-28T16:12:41Z

Alex Gleason (nprofile…rtq4) armada's relay is prohibiting PoW on gift wraps:

Possible unintended consequences of a panopticon crony capitalism ...

2026-10-26T19:45:14Z

Possible unintended consequences of a panopticon crony capitalism machine brain: the unleashing of tens of thousands of individuals who need to become entrepreneurs in order to survive

quoting
nevent1q…3j3c
Microsoft offers 60,000 employees a voluntary exit 😱 The AI affecting is real in IT sector. This is company’s efforts to cut costs amid AI adoption, per Bloomberg. Personnel on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at a vice president level and below will be eligible. This reflects ~27% of Microsoft's total workforce https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-voluntary-exit-offer/

@nprofile…e9uk @nprofile…3stj is there a way to parameterize ...

2026-10-15T23:11:52Z

hzrd149 (nprofile…e9uk) sandwich (nprofile…3stj) is there a way to parameterize napplets? I'm building them into flotilla, and I think it would be great to be able to have parameterizable napplets. Flotilla would then construct them with relay=whatever, or room=h, etc.

Flotilla 1.13.0 is out on zapstore and web — biggest changes ...

2026-10-13T21:35:22Z

Flotilla 1.13.0 is out on zapstore and web — biggest changes are the addition of bookmarks, refinements to the home page's microblogging features (good enough now for me to quit using coracle).

Full list:

* Add bookmarks, with folders and a bookmark manager
* Redesign the chat and room composers
* Support paid spaces, with checkout and relay notifications
* Mute people from their profile menu
* Choose what the home network feed and notifications tab include, and merge notifications about the same note
* Show replies in the network feed under the note they answer
* Rework the home inbox to include space activity, and add a relay settings button to the network section
* Spotlight screen shares in calls
* Reorder lists by dragging on touch screens
* Keep a space's content across a reload, and keep working when local storage fails
* Show room references as links, every name in a reaction tooltip, and open a DM's message menu by clicking it
* Cap comment indentation on narrow screens

Thanks! They're a photogenic little bunch!

2026-10-09T00:22:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…467e
_________________________

Thanks! They're a photogenic little bunch!

A few relays I run that my fellow nostr developers might find ...

2026-10-07T16:12:44Z

A few relays I run that my fellow nostr developers might find useful:

- wss://messaging.coracle.social — auth and pow protected NIP 17 relay
- wss://indexer.coracle.social — a strfry relay that stores only kind 10002 and 10009. It replicates other indexer relays on the network.
- wss://bucket.coracle.social — you can put anything here, but it gets deleted after 30 seconds. Good for testing and nip 46 signers.

I think you have all my feedback for the time being. I added ...

2026-10-06T23:35:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…j8j6
_________________________

I think you have all my feedback for the time being. I added Relay Outbox to my blog's list of relay management tools today.

And for non-devs who want to operate relay communities?! 😁

2026-10-06T22:51:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…fffw
_________________________

And for non-devs who want to operate relay communities?! 😁

Flotilla 1.12.0 is out! The big E this time is the addition of ...

2026-10-02T23:49:00Z

Flotilla 1.12.0 is out!

The big E this time is the addition of social media features, including notifications. Flotilla might just become my new daily driver, replacing Coracle.

Other garbage:

* Share your screen in calls on all platforms
* Redesign the content library
* Add a location to profiles and a member map to the directory
* Add a notifications tab to the home network section
* Add a create post button to the home page and profiles
* Remind people about calendar events they're going to
* Record voice notes in a dialog, and go straight to the call in voice rooms
* Add a nature theme, more emoji and kaomoji
* Show rich link previews for links to spaces, rooms and profiles
* Keep a message in the composer when it fails to send, instead of dropping it
* Only raise notifications for new messages
* Keep private mutes when saving content settings, and handle muted words from other clients
* Keep edited listings and calendar events in their room
* Fix stalled uploads, quotes that hadn't loaded, misplaced comments and the emoji picker overflowing

Thanks for using it (if you do)