DEV Community: Rosano

Levels of agency

Rosano — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 22:54:18 +0000

Levels of agency

Me, you, and us in software

I've been thinking about these three framings of what is possible with a specific technology:

Look what I can do
Look what you can do
Look what we can do

An example of the first would be when someone (maybe an artist/hacker/nerd) creates a bespoke experience that showcases a way of doing things: maybe a cool visualization of events in their life, a fun automation that connects disparate services and tells you things like the current height of a beloved plant, or an utterly custom web page design to be used only once perhaps as a portfolio site. It can be a way to demonstrate control over one's materials, and a marvel to observe and interact with, but you can't make your own—this isn't meant to cast the creation as selfish, but rather to draw where the line is in terms of your ability to build something with it—perhaps even the goal is to be unique and therefore not replicatable by others.

Most apps fall into the second category by encapsulating the 'principles of an experience' (to roughly paraphrase Steve Jobs): they enable people to create their own version of the thing, be it a text document, map of meaningful locations, photo albums, or pretty much anything imaginable. We now say "there's an app for that" and it's the default way for most people to express themselves through digital mediums. 'Look what you can do' empowers people to explore, create, and then share with others, more so than the first category, so there's an order of magnitude difference in the possibility space, but it's also more complex to build as one needs to consider the assumptions of multiple kinds of stakeholders or 'users'.

In the third category, adding social layers can encourage network effects and moves the technology beyond a tool or utility into collective creation; this can occur through follower graphs, timelines, multiplayer, ratings, etc… Producing a digital artifact has platform native ways for people to interact and react, either passively through comments and 'likes' or more actively through 'remixing' (such as reaction videos on YouTube or lip-syncing on TikTok). It's even more difficult to build than the second category because of the additional complexity of network interactions and identity management, but the result is that the technology starts to take on a life of its own as the experience becomes dominated by how other people use it.

Somewhere between these categories, one can find extensions and customization (achieved through some apps as 'scripting'). When someone extends an app for themselves, it might be an example of the first category, whereas passing that around brings it closer to the second, and sharable platform native 'plugins' or 'add-ons' or 'bots' can bring it closer to the third.

Usability and accessibility can impact where a technology falls on the spectrum: not paying attention to these dimensions makes it harder to move to higher levels of agency, staying more exclusive as "Look at what I/you/we can do, as the capable ones"; as in the first level, it's not necessarily selfish but if the intention is to maximize agency, then this creates a mismatch. Self-hosting generally suffers from this, but there are Easy Indie platforms that enable one-click installation, thereby broadening the potential base of people able to participate. Tools like WAVE can help spot simple improvements to accessibility in web-based projects. Although mainstream software expectations can be an antipattern, a cultural appreciation for the simple and functional can help raise usability standards, turning design into a language understood by more people.

I see adding interoperability between systems and enabling data to be re-combined in abstract ways as kind of another level, maybe "Look what a not-yet-existing entity can do": enabling future possibilities by opening data to be composed by the unknown is, in my opinion, just as transformative as moving from 'I' to 'you' or 'you' to 'we'. The emerging Zero Data ecosystem (keeping data and apps encapsulated from one another) feels promising as a usable example of what this could be like. Automation systems like Zapier or n8n are also useful as a way to ensure data is composable, or at least exposed as an API. It shows to me that #OwnYourData is not just about privacy or autonomy, but also about the cool cybernetic possibilities of a future we haven't imagined yet.

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I've never worked in a company

Rosano — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 12:22:58 +0000

Avoiding employment was not an explicit choice I made: it's just how things ended up as I followed my passions.

(Okay, I taught piano lessons in various music schools for a couple of years, and maybe did some odd jobs here and there, but not as a career.)

While studying music in university I started working on an iPhone app for learning songs from recordings, to help myself get into Jazz music but also as a tool for other musicians and music students to improve their playing. This was a collaboration with Wil with various names that eventually became AudioScrub. Not so successful at launch, but after a year or so of more development and people starting to use it and share with friends, it became a meaningful amount—not a lot, but enough to pay my bills, stay independant, travel a little. I surprised myself by learning iPhone programming on the sixth try. It was gratifying to finally make a 'real app' after a while of feeling 'restricted to web apps', and I felt good hearing the emotion in how so many people describe that it's helpful it is to them.

And just after finishing my studies, I started a live music listings project called note the sound to help promote local music concerts by smaller, often unknown artists: I worked with local venues like restaurants, bars, and art spaces, charging a fee per event and created a technology stack that helped with data entry, showing event details, automatically publishing to social media, and generating printable calendars; for some time I even experimented with my own system (inspired by Amazon Mechanical Turk) to pay people to help with micro tasks like finding artist information.

From 2009 to 2021, my income was 40% from iOS apps and 60% from note the sound, regularly working alone. COVID-19 wiped out live music for a while, and when it came back I didn't want to continue with the same structure—customers repeatedly asked me if I would restart as they were happy with the service, which I guess was a good sign; I hope to someday try again but with a different structure where I don't need to be so involved. The iOS apps became less and less motivating because of the amount of work as a one-person operation, so I ultimately stopped. Although I didn't yet replace any of those incomes with something stable, and it might sometimes feel like a uphill battle to do so, I would say 12 years is not a bad run and I'm proud of what I've done.

I've been experimenting with a Fund button integrated into my web apps (which for me are now 'real apps'), gathering support on Open Collective, and using Ghost to power memberships for Strolling. I've often said that my goal was "to get a thousand people to pay me ten bucks a year" as a metaphor for living from passive income—in practice most people want to give me more than than, so the numbers probably will be a bit different; this might sound like a meager sum for many people, but 1) I believe that to achieve this implies that there's probably more than a thousand people and 2) I would be willing to sacrifice some comfort to maintain my freedom to spend my time on what excites me.

Obviously it can be fulfilling to be employed, have a salary, feel secure, work with a team of great people, and I respect the various reasons people pursue that path, but I'm clearly wired for something else and will exhaust all options before I go there.

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Cover photo by Andrew Neel

Secular churches for continuity

Rosano — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 17:15:30 +0000

I tend to describe modern life as 'fragmented'. Lacking a 'canonical place' to create continuity from shared experiences, people rarely collide on a regular basis and end up separated from one another, despite wishing otherwise.

Although there is an abundance of spaces, events, and communities, they tend to lack continuity unless you are a part of groups specific to work, school, clubs, activities—I'm not aware of something that spans all of these contexts, other than places of worship. I re-encounter people mostly 'by chance' (it so happens we showed up to the same thing at the same time) or 'by appointment' (we booked a one-off time to meet and honoured it)—with luck, it might happen more than once, but continuity is a struggle. Committing to a recurring schedule is challenged by modern forces, including but not limited to: 'survival' responsibilities (like work, family, self-care, etc…); a culture of busyness; the feeling of limited time to pursue one's own interests; the idea that recurring meetings stagnate the dynamic (perhaps there won't be enough to talk about); compartmentalized living creates friction to knowing one's neighbours…

I might not be seeing past my personal difficulties in dealing with this, or maybe I'm just hoping to recreate something I felt was lost when I left the church, but I'm sure other people also struggle with these impediments, or worse, feel like they have no place to go.

What's missing

I grew up inside the church and it was a significant part of my life until adulthood, so it's the context I'm most familiar with. After spending the more recent portion of my life mostly in secular spaces, I notice things that I miss and would like to have as part of my experience:

it happens every week, but it's okay to miss it; even if people attend different time slots than you, you might catch them between services and have a chance to connect; you can pass various stages of your life there, or possibly all of it.
'everybody' is there; a mix of friends, colleagues, coworkers, family, acquaintances; across interests, age groups, levels of education, and physical or mental capacities.
low barriers to participation encourage the previous point; being a 'professional' is not necessary; there are no entry fees or technical requirements; 'non-believers' are usually welcome.
community space where other things happen during the week; probably a local, physical place, but various aspects could be translated online; there's probably one near you.
not cohort-based like schools; people may leave, but not on a schedule; it's natural for different waves and generations to interact over time.
'everyone' doing something together, perhaps through music or rites; there are various roles for people to participate (singing, reading, communion, announcements, organizing, training, collection); kind of a giant communal moment where all participate.

There are likely plenty of structural issues to consider, but I'm focusing on the parts that would be useful in other contexts. The result is a microcosm or universe with many subgroups and intersections, and a great serendipity generator.

Defragmentation possibilities

I'm not sure what to propose as a way to cultivate these properties in a secular context, but I have seen some ideas hinting at 'broader ranges' of people together on a regular basis.

The Sunday Assembly might be a literal translation: a weekly gathering of people who listen to talks and sing popular music together.

Places devoted to social lubricants like coffee or alcohol are probably more accessible and prevalent these days. I like the way Emmet Shear describes how congregation in these places decreases with technological change:

Vienna in the 1900s, was famous for its café culture. And one of the big drivers of that café culture was expensive newspapers that were hard to get, and as a result, people would go to the café and read the shared copy there. And once they're in the cafe, they meet the other people also reading the same newspaper, they converse, they exchange ideas and they form a community. In a similar way, TV and cable used to be more expensive, and so you might not watch the game at home. Instead you'd go to the local bar and cheer along with your fellow sports fans there. But as the price of media continues to fall over time thanks to technology, this shared necessity that used to bring our communities together falls away. We have so many amazing options for our entertainment, and yet it's easier than ever for us to wind up consuming those options alone. Our communities are bearing the consequences. For example, the number of people who report having at least two close friends is at an all-time low. I believe that one of the major contributing causes to this is that our entertainment today allows us to be separate.

Online communities may have some potential as they are always-on and can bring together the largest possible quantity of people, but molding the technology to avoid chaos or context collapse is a challenge. I'm most optimistic about decentralized communities around writing (longing for the blogosphere days), and deeper conversations with a diverse range of people (as might happen in Interintellect). Social networks each have subsets of 'your people' depending on how they relate to technology, and I've been trying to get around this by starting a weekly thing, creating affordances for more participation, and leveraging specific platforms to increase sustainability.

My hope

I would most like to see lifelong communities built around continuous learning, as described in this post about Free Schools:

Communal spaces (and schools) should be like this: always open, welcoming, and safe. A space like this, provides a place for people to learn, build, get practical experience, and express themselves.

Imagine schools or libraries as plentiful, and run by people within their own communities. Normalizing the desire to learn and grow would give anyone a common 'place to go', regardless of what they believe. How can this be encouraged today?

If you're thinking about ways to defragment society, please share your thoughts here with me, or in your public square.

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(Image by Valiant Made.)

Why I added text to my 'pure icon' site after eight years

Rosano — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 15:21:53 +0000

Since 2013, I was using a website design with no visible words—icons only; it was an obsession with The icon is a promise and the perspective of words being 'limited' in expressing things. Eventually I added text available only to screenreaders, and thought it was interesting to have a context where visually impaired persons (VIPs) would be able to 'see more' than sighted people. I digged the pure visual aesthetic and the designed seemed like it would last forever (just keep adding icons to the list). I also avoided explaining 'me' because I thought that 'what I do should explain me', and seeked to make everythig 'about the projects'. So for almost a decade, I have been 'explaining' myself to the online world with a list of icons, and a small amount of project-specific text essentially invisible to most people. After contemplating this recently, I began to notice issues.

When imagining what it's like for someone arriving there, I feel it would be overwhelming to click on anything: a giant list of icons, each one descending into a rabbit hole of who knows what, not one seeming to offer a sense of the landscape or horizon—how does one decide where to start? I suspect that the poor sense of 'what to click on next' might cause me to lose many people who arrive there and feel lost. It would be selfish to expect people to essentially gamble with their attention and click many links at random in order to understand the larger picture—if they aren't able to understand, the medium of communication has failed. Worse, I realized recently that although it was possible to hover on icons to see the name and description of each icon, this was not possible on mobile devices. I sometimes thought I was raising awareness about the needs of VIPs, but in retrospect it was kind of a jerk move to make it harder for most people on purpose… So it's time to try something different. It should be simple to get an overview of what's going on: perhaps better to present with more information.

Comparing current and previous layouts: text is now visible everywhere without any special interaction or hardware and there is a small blurb about me which links to an about page for a more textual overview. I think both frame everything in a way that's more accessible for everyone, making it simpler to understand what on earth I'm doing with my life. I feel happy with the result: I still dig the aesthetic and actually find it more friendly. Looking forward to see how this next phase of the design goes, and how much time passes until the next change.

As a bonus, check out the pre-2013 layout on Wayback Machine.

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(Image by Uriel Soberanes.)

Platform puzzle pieces for sustainable community

Rosano — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 02:10:15 +0000

Thinking about how to integrate multiple systems while building community and sustainable income.

This year, I started to prioritize community building, which led to the creation of the Ephemerata newsletter and The Café forum (see My mother's gift for some origins). Seeking a hub to house everything and make it accessible with one account, I was determined to make it work with forum software and published the newsletter there as a way to have 'something' happening; it's been nice to see people sign up and share comments without me inviting anyone, but it could be more active, and I should invest there once I feel comfortable doing less in other communities. Seeking also to explore patronage or voluntary contributions as a way to fund what I do, I was determined to use a homegrown payment system or an Open Collective profile, but neither are well integrated with community space or the unlocking of 'perks'. Since beginning these experiments, I have become more aware of other platforms and am trying to reconcile the benefits of each one with the properties I would like to have in my toolkit. It's possible for me to 'build my own system' but that would take time from doing what it's designed to support, especially as a single-person operation; this might be a case where it's better to use existing parts and close gaps by creating plugins or automating with tools like Zapier or n8n. Let's review the existing systems…

Community (Talking together)

Discourse is modern forum software that onboards people to participate, encourages reading, and nudges the right things. It's an exciting set of tools and primitives on an open-source foundation—an increasingly common extensible language—and even can be accessed with a native app to see notifications from all servers in one place. It's good for asynchronous communication, giving people badges, and a comments layer for content written elsewhere. As much as I hoped to do everything here and leverage its various affordances for community, it demands more effort (or friction) for people to post, and it's not so elegant as a 'home' for long-form writing (see Evolution one.

I have despised Discord for its chaotic arcade-like approach to communication, but after learning of a unified notifications pane which doesn't require me to click and bounce around dozens of channels to keep up, it's more manageable for me. The main advantage is that it's low-friction, either when signing up (as one account is shared across multiple communities) or when posting ('easily posting quick things' is not just for 'less dedicated people' but also makes it simpler for your tribe to participate); people can sign up and move from passive to more active at their own pace. It's better for synchronous communication—which I generally avoid as it can be anxiety-inducing—giving people a sense of 'together, now'. It's not good if you avoid proprietary systems (the only closed-source project on this page), vendor lock-in and its network effects, information overload from over-notification noise, or chronologically-emphasized systems which are inherently Designed to disappear. I would be open to using this if the messages delete automatically after a certain period, thus making it easier to change platforms later.

These posts talk more about the tradeoffs of both and how to integrate them better:

As an honourable mention, I like the ideas in Luma: events require email addresses to attend, thus providing a sense of how many people are interested, while also building a mailing list and offering a discussion space for people to connect in between. You can also accept donations or charge money for things, which relates to the next section. Too proprietary for me, but I think it's well-made and can help you to grow faster.

Funding (Sustainable income)

Thinking about the best long-term solution for funding my work, I started at the outset by building my own payments system and integrating it into my apps (see the fund button): this enables direct integration with my apps (unlocking of features), while supporting both Paypal and Stripe. The novel idea behind this is that there is no data stored by me (everything is embedded in the transaction, which is stored by the payment processor) and people can use 'their own accounts' (but the 0data concept is so early that most people don't have one yet). It lacks a more elegant 'manage your subscription' mechanism, which means that although it's possible to modify and cancel at any time, it might feel cryptic. Another major flaw is the design decision to not collect contact information of the subscriber: anonymity has its merits, but I think if people pay me subscription money, I would prefer to have a communications channel in both directions in case anything goes wrong. In short: my system is functional, but might be a fail.

Open Collective is a new way to crowdfund on a recurring basis. Unlike more popular patronage platforms, it promotes transparency and implements fiscal hosting so that one doesn't need a legal entity to receive payments. The visual design lacks warmth (figures-oriented, as if for accountants) and only makes it faintly visible when it's possible to 'give more than the minimum' (non-techies might miss this option entirely)–I believe both of these things decrease the income potential. I was avoiding it for those reasons, but after trying it out, I think the ideals make sense, and so far it's more 'financially successful' than my other avenues even though contributors aren't getting something material in return (yet).

Ghost has made me turn my head several times in the last few months: own your newsletter and your subscriber payment data; patron-only content; passwordless signup via email and magic links; nice external and internal design; integration with automation systems; easy to host it yourself… Their 'Portal' (a slicker alternative to my own funding button) is super compelling: seamlessly handles free and paid memberships (but no PayPal), offers an elegant 'manage your subscription' interface, and (perhaps not so well-known) you can embed it on other sites. I wish it were less 'broadcast and business'-oriented, but I think you don't have to use it that way—might be better to combine it with other platforms. There are some great interface patterns that could become a common language across the web, and active development is supported by a sustainably-funded team.

The ideal solution

Seeing as none of these individual projects span both community and payments, my imagined ideal system would have these properties:

own your community data; badges; asynchronous conversation; extensible (like Discourse)
own your subscriber data and payment relationship; patron-only content; nice interfaces everywhere (like Ghost)
bring your own account (like my funding button, 0data, or Delta Chat)
transparency and fiscal hosts (like Open Collective)
passive signup and synchronous conversation (like Discord), but ephemeral messages

To work towards this, I think I will try a mix of all these tools, but I'm inclined to put Ghost closer to the center. Despite working on my funding button for about half a year, I might switch to the Ghost 'Portal' as it is a pattern language people understand, has a more robust account system that's passwordless, and can be embedded on any site–it should also simplify the programming integration while giving a better experience for people using my apps. Stay tuned over the course of next year to see how all this evolves.

Thanks to Boris for the #prompt to write about this.

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(Image by Ashkan Forouzani.)

Dating apps, take one

Rosano — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 16:40:24 +0000

For most of my life, I have not been so open to the idea of using technology to find romantic relationships. Coming from a culturally conservative background, dating itself could only happen under very specific and limited circumstances. Moving past that, a lifetime of experience with computers and everything digital filled me with distrust towards matching systems whether old-school (long questionnaires leading to compatibility rates) or the swiping systems (the 'Hot or Not' game somehow still prevalent today), a perspective that can be summarized as 'machines are stupid'. I decided to give it a try towards the end of 2020 as I was feeling isolated during the pandemic, mostly as a way to make friends and meet new people (which might have been counter-intuitive given the context).

This was my first attempt ever at using dating apps, and I was in Brasília (the capital city of Brazil) between various upper middle-class neighbourhoods with preference for those who conform to something (padrão) that I don't really do well. I tried five of the more popular apps: Tinder, which I loath, but it's where most of the people are and therefore fairly diverse; Bumble, where women make the first move in heterosexual matches, but not as well-used; OkCupid, with more opportunities to be thoughtful in how you present yourself; Happn, highly location-based (literally who passed you by), where I had a handful of calls with fairly sincere people; and Inner Circle, for rich people, where I made somewhere between one and zero matches.

All of them (and likely even most of the ones I didn't try) focus on photos and swiping left or right to indicate intent, while trying to inject random bits of serendipity though game-like mechanisms—like chicken sexing, but maybe more fun. A multiplicity of ways to portray oneself is sacrificed in the name of speed, favouring visual representations and perception through those signals. This might be fine in specific contexts, but when universally applied, mainstream stereotypes of beauty tend to dominate everyone's experience, which pressures people perceived as 'abnormal' to conform, or floods them with noise. I don't think most people realize how much technology steers culture towards certain outcomes: an app starts with affordances for visual communication, then as it grows, we influence each other to do what succeeds in that format; when that shifted culture becomes our new baseline for how billions of people relate to one another, what does it say about our agency, or ability to be intentional in how we shape our world? The emphasis on photos turned me off to the point that I would reflexively tune out attractive people if they seemed to project affluence or a sort of 'mass-market beauty'. The swipe gestures are also error-prone, probably ableist, and not always consistent between apps; there's more than one way to do this, and I hope the well-paid developers of these apps explore a greater vocabulary of matching than 'left or right', perhaps attempt to approximate the spectrum of possibilities in meatspace. When I asked women (sometimes from these apps, sometimes from my own circles) about their experiences using these apps, they seemed to commonly receive too much of what they don't want from people they don't want to engage with—maybe this approach isn't working for everyone? What if, in addition to pictures, you could hear the person describe themselves (like a sort of answering machine greeting)? How would changing the velocity of selecting between profiles impact how much attention we give to each one? What would it look like if apps encouraged us to be vulnerable or authentic?

I managed to have some good experiences despite the shortcomings of these apps, but the connections generally felt disposable. One of my favourite words in Portuguese is 'correria' (translatable as 'rush' or 'scramble': imagine lots of people frantically running around), and for me, it describes the feeling of everyone simultaneously texting dozens of people; it's hard for me to have more meaningful exchanges this way (I'm 'slower'), and having infinite options makes it 'cheaper' for everyone (including myself) to cast a wider net. My months of exploring these apps could be quantified as: hundreds of messages with thirty to fifty matches, maybe a dozen interesting conversations, some video calls, a couple of dates, and essentially no friendships or relationships whatsoever. It was during a pandemic however, and I think the result would have been better if everyone could easily meet in public. The environment seems to encourage people to play games and create a false sense of scarcity, which is odd when you live by abundance and actively dismantle that when it happens. I felt relieved to stop using them, to not need to pay attention to so many notifications and engage in superficial conversations. Everyone has different expectations there, and mine expectations may not have been aligned with most people or with what the environment encourages.

That all sounds pessimistic, but I do think there's hope for these things if they're made with more thoughtfulness: the bar is currently so low that there's an open field for cultivating more meaningful interactions via matchmaking. Showing people at 'random' can be useful, and maybe even necessary, but there needs to be more than one method of exploring who's out there, and ideally multiple ways for people to represent themselves: less visual, more filterable. I think this kind of tool could have great outcomes depending on how the culture wields it; I'm less interested in seeing what happens when the app wields culture without us realizing it. Although I generally make more meaningful connections in my own contexts, I might give dating apps a second chance post-pandemic, but I know that anything good occurring will likely happen in spite of the apps, not because of them.

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Going fully web

Rosano — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 15:42:12 +0000

Why I stopped making iOS apps after twelve years.

I have been working on iOS apps since 2009, starting by a collaboration with Wil on AudioScrub (née iLift), and eventually going solo in 2014. After twelve years on the App Store, I've decided it's time to go all in on the web, and would like to share what that means and outline the tradeoffs involved.

The spur for this change occurred years ago after the launch of my seventh app sonogrid. Although the project had iterations over several years, it mostly came together in the summer of 2018: I overworked myself for months, with incessant attention to detail, and was eager to present this to people I would meet during my upcoming trip to Colombia (they really love music there, and this app was for music lovers). The app launched to a good reception online within various iOS music app communities, but to my dismay, most of the Colombians I met in person were not able to access it because Apple devices are prohibitively expensive there. I would offer to demo the app on my phone and let the other person play with it after: repeatedly, they would enjoy the interface and become immersed in a fun creative process, only to become disappointed on learning that it's not on Android. It was hard to resolve the contradiction between producing something I was super proud to share—a kind of magnificent zenith in my iOS trajectory—and realizing that only half the world can use it. This was a bit deflating, and I wasn't motivated to do double the work just because of platform duopolies. Added to this was the more subtle but long-standing aversion to the 'review process' that native apps go through before appearing on the App Store: I was hesitant to invest further in an environment with little control and leverage over my own future, with a constant fear of 'reviewer rejection' and the rug slipping out from under me at any time. So I took a step back and haven't updated many of my iOS apps since then.

In place, I worked on various web components and put them together to create about a dozen web-based projects. Contrasting the experience between the web and native (i.e. iOS) worlds, I feel more enthusiastic about how the web is evolving. It can still be 'limited' in comparison to native apps, but that gap is gradually closing and most of my ideas already fit within what's currently possible.

Just to review, in case it's not obvious, there are some more commonly understood reasons for choosing the web over native:

Basically all current and future devices (mobile, tablet, desktop) and operating systems (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux) are supported.
Projects are simpler and more cost-effective to build and deploy, with tools and skills that are easier to acquire.
A thriving universe with bazillions of communities spanning the entire Internet provides lots of answers to questions, and most knowledge is based on open standards and therefore highly transferable.
Backwards compatibility is a priority, which means your project is likely to continue working despite technology evolving over time.
You can make changes whenever you like and have them online within seconds or minutes, as opposed to requiring third-party approval for everything, which could take days or weeks.
The environment makes it more and more empowering for single-person or small team operations to produce things, without requiring the resources of a large company.

The challenges of the web for developers like myself is to help people 'cross the chasm' that exists due to a lack of common patterns for interacting with apps:

There is no obvious 'App Store', so people are left to search the wider web (amongst articles, videos, cat pictures, and everything else), but maybe there could be one that celebrates the 'instant' nature of this platform, or a subscription bundle like SetApp to help with discovery.
There is no universal 'buy' button—every project does this their own way, but the Ghost Portal is becoming more and more common, and I'm trying something similar with my Fund Button.
The idea of an 'install' button isn't ubiquitous, and some web apps may not be mobile-friendly or local-first, but for the rest there are libraries like a2hs.js that help guide people to make accessing web apps a more familiar experience: simply click on an app icon to launch.
The lack of an integrated payment system means that every project needs to re-build trust and help others be comfortable enough in the environment to support them financially, but Stripe Checkout, PayPal Checkout, and Web Monetization are contributing various solutions that reduce friction from this process. (I would also love to see fiscal hosting become more prevalent so that having a legal entity is not necessary to receive money.)
Performance has often held back the types of applications that can be built on the web platform, but WebAssembly will eliminate this issue for a whole class of ideas.

There are plenty of people working to create open solutions to these 'missing features'; it seems like a solvable problem with time.

(Feel free to skip this section if you'd rather not hear me complain about Apple.) I'm sharing some negative aspects of my experience making native apps with hesitation, not to be a downer but because there might be people that aren't really familiar with the developer side:

The paternal review process can be soul-crushing at times: reviewers don't enforce rules consistently; bad app(le)s get approved and grift people out of money or personal information; it's an anxiety-ridden process that can feel unpredictable. You may have a good impression of Apple if you've bought their products: calling them for support usually means speaking to a friendly person who takes responsibility for your issue and tries to resolve it. App Review on the other hand might as well be an outsourced company, incredibly bureaucratic, and often feels like talking to a rock; any sensuality around the Apple brand quickly vanishes under these bright white office lights as you find yourself filling out TPS reports in the developer cubicle all of a sudden.
Large companies dominate the App Store listings and generally get better treatment. The lucky independent developers are ones who have the ear of someone who works at Apple to support them if there's a dispute and either push their app through App Review or get it featured.
It's quite a task for an individual or small team to produce an app, create screenshots and videos, localize everything in multiple languages, respond to reviews, and keep on top of technology that changes every year. The prototypical success looks more like a large organization than two guys in a garage.
It feels like feeding into a device ecosystem of planned obsolescence and overconsumption, where developers and consumers need to keep upgrading—an insatiable appetite for more.
The certificates and signing from the build process is complex and can bring development to a halt if you don't have the right combination of XCode and macOS (hint: keep buying new Macs).
The expanding variety of screen sizes forces you to learn responsiveness primitives which are platform-specific and create a complex array of image and video assets at different sizes for distribution.
The constantly changing environment will break your app and force you to either hurry and accommodate the changes or receive messages from customers asking why it doesn't work anymore.
You can't simply share your app with a friend or even install it on your own device without paying rent or getting permission through App Review.

There's obviously lots of positives to native platforms as well, but these kind of things weigh down smaller operations like mine, favouring large companies with resources and time to deal with this ever-growing complexity.

Despite the web's challenges, there's much that excites me about its future and and some of these characteristics are intrinsic to the platform:

The concept of instant games promotes highly shareable apps via a simple link that require no install process: show up and start.
Having multiple payment providers, potentially with the addition of cryptocurrencies means if you wanted to also just invent your own value system, maybe some kind of post-money coupon thing, it's possible to integrate with existing systems…
User-controlled personal data stores are already being used on the web and will eventually make their way to native apps.
Edge apps that work completely in the browser are easy to mirror or fork, and virtually free to distribute: imagine having your site/app available everywhere via IPFS
The culture of perpetual improvement, with less focus on versioning, is normal: people do not need to 'install updates' for each app they use on every change.
It's just more fun and with a lower barrier to entry, which results in more diverse and dynamic communities who form part of a larger public commons: more sparks, more life, more weird.

My iOS apps have been quietly free for a while and I'm officially announcing that now. Early next year, they will disappear forever; I'm not completely sure how this works—I understand you can continue to use them, perhaps even re-download them, but only if you already have it. I would like to eventually re-make them for the web (be welcome to join me or keep me alive). In the meantime, enjoy these apps while they last. I'm jumping head first into a world bubbling with new possibilities, and excited to develop for the largest open pool of people on the planet.

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Discussion is ephemeral

Rosano — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 19:39:42 +0000

Divide social activity in digital spaces into two categories: discussion and reference.

Most activity is discussion: news or blog updates, shared links, forum discussions, microblogging hot takes, comments, private or group messages, livestreaming, newsletters. They speak to a particular moment in time.

Examples of reference can include: wikis, git repositories, project documentation, question/answer sites or FAQs, indexes. These resources are not directly concerned with specific moments in time — they attempt to be organized according to context and relevance.

Discussion begins to fade the moment it is published. It can be temporarily revived (bumped) by some kind of activity or update, but this itself is a form of discussion that begins to fade on arrival.

The effect of this 'fading' is that whatever was gained through discourse becomes more difficult to find with time, as newer content takes precedence — the reverse-chronological organization of most technology makes things designed to disappear, and digital systems generally do not remind us that there is a cost to keeping things forever. Technology is inconsiderate.

Combat this ephemerality by

capturing ideas into reference as often as possible
deliberately making older content less accessible
warning about any false sense of findability

Something needs to be lost, there must be some cost to keep things around. As an example, an engineer at Stripe talks about how

they automatically delete chat messages older than a few weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival. In retrospectives, team members often reflect on whether they chose the right medium (email, chat, or forum) for various conversations.

Discussion is necessary for exploring possibilities without friction. Reference gives longevity to the results.

Compare the possibilities enabled by these scenarios

discussion	reference
send a quote of an article to a friend or post it on your timeline	compile similar resources and build a larger idea from small disparate pieces
search for an idea by scrolling through a reverse-chronological archive	browse by context and stumble upon something related but unexpected

The Wikum project is a web-based platform that integrates discussion and collaborative summarization.

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Wetware of writing and doing

Rosano — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 13:18:21 +0000

Originally presented at Tools for Thought Rocks on October 29, 2021 (with video and timestamps). Below is an expanded text version of my presentation for anyone who prefers reading.

I talk often about my apps and their features, but rarely about how I use them day-to-day—partially to leave space for people to imagine their own workflows, but also because I didn't think it wouldn't be of interest to share mine. This changed after a conversation with pvh, who remarked that after reading the website for Launchlet and trying to play with the compose interface, it wasn't clear how all the parts came together until watching my tutorial videos—I found that interesting coming from someone who has plenty of experience with computer programming and its paradigms. It made me realize 1) that interfaces clearly communicating 'features' doesn't mean people appropriate them, 2) the importance of good affordances to help people go beyond merely 'using the app' to extending themselves in the process. The larger question to address here is: how can the environment better transmit what is possible so that those within it can take fuller advantage? It will likely take some time for me to find my own answers and implement them in projects, so for now, I feel motivated to do what is knowable and share more about how I use my apps to illuminate the wetware.

What I find myself 'doing' most of the time involves: making apps and websites; writing texts about personal experiences and interests; recording screencasts about programming; organizing online events; and generally working on personal projects. It all adds up, and to keep things from overwhelming me I practice a productivity trinity which can be summarized as:

Capture everything: get ideas out of your head as soon as possible.

Organize if needed: move it where you are likely to encounter it.

Purge: do it or delete it as soon as possible.

The mix of details below might seem chaotic, but they all relate to these three points in some way.

One objective of Capture everything is to keep going: I avoid interruptions like checking out links people send me and do everything later; it helps to maintain focus on whatever has my attention. Making time to read articles or watch videos can be a challenge and often gets neglected, but in my experience it usually happens eventually and delaying consumption has the benefit of obsoleting some things before you get to it. When there's a lot of collecting from streams or timelines and placing into queues help batch the process of reading, watching, listening, and writing, it helps to have a place to put things.

Most of my queues are digital now (although at one point I did write and organize my life with small pieces of paper): Pocket is for reading because it syncs with my e-reader (to read without internet access, and with something closer to paper than a screen, and without the distractions of my computer or phone), and for checking out websites because I like to close all my browser tabs as soon as possible; 1Feedis for newsletters (as it interrupts my flow to read long text while checking e-mail), and for following Internet things with a timeline presentation; Joybox is for audiovisual media segmented with tags for listening, watching, and passive consumption; Kommit is for words and phrases that I want to learn from foreign languages; Launchlet is for shortcuts and removing friction from workflows; Emoji Log is for personal tracking and time-bound journaling, like books I read or recipes I cook, or more personal thoughts and monitoring emotions. For everything else, there's Hyperdraft, which is mostly reference-oriented and not time-bound—it functions as: dashboards of to-dos for dozens of projects; space to mix private and public writing; an environment that spans the entire arc of 'capture, brainstorm, organize, outline, draft, write, publish' that is on all my devices and local-first, thus minimizing discontinuities from needing to be in a specific place or not having internet access; writing queues my for various newsletters and a templating system for Ephemerata; quick jot-pads for when I'm not sure where to put something; and a convenient place for Ideas increment automatically when they are captured.

All these queues provide, on the one hand, a sense of space that I find relaxing because there is a place to put things, and on the other hand, an uneasiness about being overwhelmed as they are easy to neglect and intentionally out of sight; the serenity is stronger when you trust yourself to attend to them. How does one maintain balance and create healthy rhythms for processing these queues? Many of my strategies help me avoid being 'completist' and find reasons to purge things when there's a backlog: if I read until the halfway point and haven't found anything interesting, if the video doesn't hold my attention, if I haven't moved on it in weeks, if it's expired or irrelevant now, into the void it goes. It took me a while to realize that 'delete' can mean "I don't want to be reminded of this"; we have to train digital systems to not show things 'forever'. I try to prune my lists frequently in addition to actually doing things, but it's hard for me to repeat at specific intervals as life tends to get in the way: I've found it useful to observe how I feel and find the cadence that works for me—we are not machines. One rhythm I frequently engage in with enthusiasm is [[work digress cycle]].

I've been surprised at how this idea of queues helps me 'write without magic'. It feels like writing happens without great pain or earnestness, and I think of it reductively as "mostly just moving things around". Let's say there's 3% which is creative personal expression (that everyone has but in their own way), and 97% which is stuff that requires no talent, such as: capturing ideas as they occur, allowing details to passively collect over time, periodically perusing through the old to find potential connections to the new… Here the queues function like buckets collecting drips of water: some have zero drops, some have one, some have a few; eventually some have 'enough' or are overflowing and can be marked as prompts for finalizing, which for me implies taking a queue or list of items to sort, group, massage, tidy, and publish. It's easier than confronting a blank screen, or twiddling thumbs to figure out how to start, and showcases the power of Writing creates a space for 'the answer to go': with little effort, I find myself having lots to write about, unintimidated by the process of finishing. I think everyone has the necessary pieces to do this, but most people get stuck in their 97%, which is a tractable problem that can be encroached upon by finding tools and workflows that fit, making things simpler or perhaps effortless, and cultivating calm spaces to write and reason that are free from judgement.

Understanding the wetware is not always obvious and I'm still not sure of how it should be presented, be it in words or an interface. I hope that with plenty of examples of how I use my apps, it helps unveil how they can be leveraged to do more. In the future, I would hope to integrate an understanding of my own processes into the onboarding of my software so that it doesn't require more than the experience of using the app to feel empowered by all its possibilities. I might summarize this first exploration as 1) collect, organize, purge with lots of queues, 2) let time work in your favour, and 3) spend time on what motivates you.

P.S. Thanks to Jess Martin and Tools for Thought Rockscommunity for the invitation to present, and the prompt—this wouldn't exist if it wasn't for your concept of 'Workflow Walkthroughs' 🙏🏽.

P.P.S. For anyone who made it this far, please enjoy this short video of my old-time analog to-do dashboard.

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Events are work

Rosano — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 14:35:36 +0000

This year has marked the beginning of a shift in my approach: from doing virtually everything solo towards more collectivity and collaboration; the transition has barely begun and is still quite slow as I rewire myself to avoid what has become natural and automatic after over a decade's practice. I have been thinking and learning about community for longer, but started taking concrete steps around May 9th with the creation of a forum and this newsletter, places with potential to become larger than me.

An important part of this shift has been to bring people together in the form of events, so I looked around me to see where I could contribute. remoteStorage is one of the primary technologies I use in my apps, so I began hosting monthly hangouts. Zero Data seems to be flying away from my nest and turning into a community project, so I started to facilitate some swap meets. I also enjoy getting to know Interintellect, which is a community of people that come together in self-organized group conversations (salons) about eclectic topics, and so I have strived to regularly host my own salons.

Although I have some prior experience with running events, I somehow didn't anticipate how overwhelmed and fatigued I would eventually feel by doing so many of these. I remember thinking to myself: "it's just conversations about stuff I'm immersed in, all I have to do is show up and do my thing, no big deal." To give a sense of the work, from before to after: pre-event involves coordination with others, documenting and framing with text that others can understand, letting interested people know, making announcements at specific times before the event, calming any mental anguish about zero people possibly attending; the event itself involves mentally preparing and blocking out time in the day, being present and ideally taking notes on the conversation, remembering to hit the record button if that's a thing, hopefully add something insightful to the discussion; post-event involves thanking and outreach, summarizing the notes, editing the recording, publishing in multiple relevant places and sharing that. What I thought of as one hour of spontaneous conversation implies about two days of preparation and two days of recapitulation, and as this happens about three times a month, it feels like three out of four weeks in each month are write-offs, with time and energy only for random unrelated things that need to get done and not much for making apps or advancing on projects.

In reflecting on how to remedy this imbalance, I think it makes sense (for now) to just keep doing the events. One form of stress comes from always feeling like I'm 'supposed' to be doing my 'real work' on projects, which went from receiving 'All Available Daylight Hours' to 'Not Even One Iota' for consecutive weeks—as someone used to having freedom over how I spend my time, this was hard to grapple with. But I thought recently: maybe it's fine for my 'primary commitment' of app-making to be supplanted by something else for a while. Maybe this makes getting other people involved an imperative to progress. After years of working so hard on the same thing, perhaps it would be good to do something different for a while.

A friend rightly reminded me how new this is: a couple of months ago I wanted to be more social and collective, and now I'm putting it into action; it's worth taking time to acknowledge this progress, maybe even celebrate. I've certainly been enjoying meeting new people and creating spaces where new things can be said. The skills and experience are both useful, but I'd still prefer to delegate so much more, so please reach out if you'd like to get involved in any of this: I could use a hand.

P.S. Mad respect to Boris for trying to do this kind of thing weekly with Fission Tech Talks.

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Rethinking analytics

Rosano — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 13:55:02 +0000

A while ago, after years of being "analytics-free", I decided to try Plausible Analytics and I want to share what led me to start thinking differently.

The original provocation was learning that Photopea, despite financial success as a one-person operation, earns most of its revenue from advertising and only four percent of its revenue from subscriptions or memberships. Considering that I am trying to finance my own sustainability directly via the people using the app, I thought it curious that this income equalled a sort of 'minimum wage' despite being a well-known, high-traffic project. I don't intend or know how to make something as complex and deep as a Photoshop clone, and so I wondered if I would have fewer opportunities than this—perhaps I need to be open to selling ads at some point in the future, if that's what it takes to keep content freely accessible on the web. (On the other hand, I believe it's better to avoid comparing yourself to others and complexity is not synonymous with income, but I'm not sure how to think about all this at the moment).

Another reason is that I had a hard time turning garbage numbers like 'requests' (which include bots and counts multiple files for each pageload) into something that gives me an idea of 'how many people are actually looking at this?'. I believe in talking to the people who use what you make, but I think many (or most?) people don't have time to write in their impressions, and so this will always be smaller by a magnitude you cannot know; there is value in passive feedback and I think most people would prefer this if it's done with purpose.

So far it feels good. I aggregate visitors to various projects into a single picture. It's nice to have more meaningful numbers and to find out about interesting places that link to you, like this Brazilian guy's tech blog. One of my 100 steps to success, still in-progress, is to track your growth over time, and this is another way to do that.

I hesitated all these years because Google Analytics has become a form of surveillance capitalism, and this taints most other approaches to analytics (or at least our perceptions of it). How can this be remedied? Does it help to use open-source technology? Or if the company hosting the technology aligns with your values? Collecting data generally requires trust because one cannot verify beyond the 'privacy policy'—what about being transparent and just showing what one collects?

Similar to Buttondown, which I use to send mailing lists, I dig the spirit behind the project and its team and would like to lend my support. All this feels holistic so far, but I'm open to having my mind changed again. What do you think?

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Community Essence

Rosano — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 14:29:19 +0000

Reflecting on why events are work, I realize that the exhaustion comes from doing too much on my own. And in thinking about how to be more collaborative in what I do, I'm starting to notice an issue in my way of thinking: I start from the perspective of "X, Y, and Z are all important to the project's success, and since there doesn't seem to be anyone volunteering, I guess I'll just do it." It might be the case that I'm taking initiative or being proactive, but it seems as if my vision of involving others is to start by completing the work of six people, and then wait until individuals appear to fill particular roles (like promoting, note-taking, audiovisual editing, logistics coordinating, etc…). This is perhaps a bit backwards in this context, creating a failure mode where people would contribute in my way as opposed to theirs, thus not seeing themselves in the collaboration, thus likely not even getting involved to begin with. Rather than having pre-defined slots that someone can conform to, a more vibrant community approach would enable people to create their own possibilities for contribution.

In thriving communities like Precious Plastic or Interintellect, it seems like the leaders activate others to become leaders as opposed to doing everything solo. Compare "doing narrowly-scoped tasks in someone's project" with "starting a recycling centre" or "self-organizing an event for group conversation". What does it take to afford someone maximally radiating their individual expression within a shared purpose? One way I'm exploring this is to have a constant reminder near my to-do lists which encourages me to [somewhat extremely] "avoid doing anything unless it involves another person." I don't recommend that framing for everyone, it certainly has its issues, but I'm ready to try something really different after being in a solo phase for such a long time.

My long-standing unawareness of these dynamics may have something to do with being a digital native or 'very online', as I might be more susceptible to the ways in which technology can mislead. Only now do I understand that the 'forum' or 'chat' is not 'where the community is'. This might be obvious to many readers, but it's tempting for people like me to interpret platform metrics as an indicator of community-ness: a place may seem to have few posts or little public activity, but things might be happening in private channels or offline, and a place with a flurry of interaction risks being superficial or spammy. Content is not community in the same way that the map is not the territory.

To understand where the essence of community is, I found it useful to imagine a more low-tech approach to organizing events, perhaps for an offline in-person gathering. "Let's get together and go into that thing that gets us going." You might reach out to people you know via phone calls, or while running into them somewhere along your way, and ask them to also invite others in the same manner. No announcements, no notifications, no social media posts, no recording, no summary, no place to leave a comment: just whatever happens together. In this scenario, the community exists in interactions with one another, with no digital representations that can imply otherwise. Despite being a very online community, Interintellect exemplifies this well as, the 'substance' of it doesn't really have a digital representation: you need to attend a salon and experience the interactions with other members to understand the essence of it.

Let's contrast this with a high-tech approach like the GitHub platform, where an enormous amount of software is being built collaboratively. Although many projects successfully advance with collective effort, much of the long tail suffers from lack of contributions, or burnout from too many contributions and interface anti-patterns; collaboration begins via "Issues" (reporting a problem) or "Pull Requests" (suggesting changes you made), as opposed to making a personal connection. When everything is a digital representation and it's rare to have moments together, the essence is in the back-and-forth of discussion threads and editing files, which is a bit more abstract than 'getting to know one another' or 'inviting the people who would make it more meaningful'. It has been a struggle for me to model the methods of collaboration incentivized by this platform in my own projects, until I realized that it's better to just ignore all of them and start somewhere more interpersonal, perhaps fill the togetherness void with my own solution. What are good affordances for community in a platform like this? And what is the software encouraging? If the basis of community is relating to one another, I think it happens on GitHub in spite of the software, not because of it. For me, considering more analog approaches helps me interact more meaningfully in this kind of pure digital space.

I don't have a clear conclusion to all this at the moment, but these reflections are giving me a new perspective on community essence. Letting people come as they are and share what they have to offer allows for them to be better represented in the process. I would avoid paying too much attention to what software wants you to do, think, or feel, and start with personal connection, perhaps considering how it would come about without the Internet. Community is a verb and it exists in doing with others, more-so than in its representations.

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