Note: This is a copy of issue #111 in the
delightful-commonsrepository on Codeberg…
In a conversation with Dragos I learned about some feedback I want to note down before it gets washed away in a stream of Matrix messages. The topic that day was Big Web vs. Small Web (think web0 by @aral). We’re a group of people in that room that follow Small Web principles to various degree and with different strategies. Dragos is building efy.ooo (I contributed a little to the efy-apps repo in the past). The architecture is very modular and self-serving.
The Big Web is centralising so you have a few places and everything else revolves around it. The Small Web is very different. This poses a different set of challenges. Dragos nails it:
also, look at the big web… people mostly go to a few places… you don’t need the small web to have 999999 sites / apps necessarily, if you have a few solid ones that people like going to constantly cuz they’re useful and cool, it’s enough to steer away people from big web and move towards small web. But rn if you ask people “where do you go for playing music? what about managing files? for plating games? for reading stuff? for editing images? for scientific purposes? for religion? etc” then in most cases people don’t know where they can go… a few people know, cuz they came across options that worked well for them, but most people are like “idk… no clue where I can go”
I’m not advocating for centralization tho, that’s an optional option maybe, but maybe something like those github repos that make lists of apps based on the category, we could have something like that but as a site and promoted more often, as long as that site is more like a “library” of places or some sort of search engine, with collections easy search, tags, etc
cuz then you can just send people to that place and they can explore lots of places. Then maybe you can also have a few safe and kinda stable “recommended” ones for people that don’t wanna spend time exploring, but would like trying stuff if it doesn’t involve too much effort
we have a few of those sites, but they’re not super easy to access and organised… I saw a cool one once that was interesting, but then you’d get lost in a ton of links without knowing where you’re going and there were also no thumbnails or descriptions of the places you were gonna visit, no taggs / categories… if we had a place like that but more organized, that’d be pretty cool and useful I think
(Emphasis mine)
Now to this repo: by packaging those modules the challenge of findability and curations comes up naturally. A „central place” is comfortable. I pointed to delightful.club (now delightful.coding.social as alternative to awesome lists in response. Context:
The next step will be to have an easy way for the people who own the server to choose what apps to have there and for users to be able to “install” apps that are not on the server already.
So basically modular framework parts, modular choice of what apps to use, modular themes, all loaded in a way where you only consume the resources you wanna consume, both as an user and as a server owner.
Expressed need:
Another thing that’s important is some sort of central place for easily finding themes, apps, documentation, etc (which is what I’m personally building), but then it could be cool for other people to have their own places that provide those too, to not 100% rely on my “official” place.
Also, some new emerging things I didn’t think of but seem to make sense is modular avatars, being able to create your own levels in games, your own texture packs for games, being able to add your own sounds, fonts, etc.
And then lastly… all of this stuff is related to this particular ecosystem, BUT ideally the apps / assets / code / methods would be able to be adapted at least a bit or partially to other ecosystems too, or other ecosystems could borrow some parts from the efy ecosystem without having to directly use efy at all
oh and there’s also modules inside the apps, so for example you can experience the media player app in different ways from another user, rather than all users using the same app in the same way
and then the files are shared between apps, so that you write a more global logic that can just be included as 1-2 files, rather than writing similar logic multiple times
it basically starts as individual files for just 1 app, but if over time I notice that that logic is shared across apps, then I modularize that as a file that can be reused
Is this (themes, documentation) something we should keep a list on, too?
Can we have thumbnails and tags / categories?