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How does playhtml compare with traditional social media platforms like Instagram / Twitter / Tiktok?How does playhtml compare with decentralized social media like Mastodon / Bluesky?
Establish playhtml as a new paradigm for “social media” built on the open webEnable intimate, serendipitous encounters across the internet at human scale with global reachEnable more human and slower forms of discovery and distribution that encourages web surfingCreate a sustainable container for holding this workEvangelize creating websites that design for shared experiences to challenge the default way we view websites (from something that is solitary to a shared space)Design a diverse set of communal interactions that digital spaces can adopt and explore new pop-up formats for sharing them with the communityExplore a new medium of game-making that unfolds across different existing websites on the internet. what does an internet-native game look like?
meaningful moments facilitated between strangersthe number of websites that use itthe number of nice emails i getsomething that is used often but not everyday
pmogs draw was im not really sure lol it seems super niche but also something that people fell in love with? i guess its the draw of an indie game and having its own story? im not sure actually how many people were drawn to what it was
surf, explore, spend time in all the parts of the web that have been lost in social media worldlinger, wait, dig, learn about the people and the history of the sites you visit, about the labor behind themcreate, imagine, dream, make new worlds for people to enter, build yourself a digital home, regrow / rehabitate the web, drive more people to the native internet rather than closed platforms
farming: gathering resources from the websites that you visit, crafting new elements based off of this? gaining some sort of currency for the time you spend on the internet and the actions you take?resource spots that can be stocked with different media: links, assets, songs, messageswhat if elements of a website automatically become “inventory” items?like the fonts, assets, colors, authorship & provenance of the things you makeencourages surfing / exploring less visited parts of the web because they are less picked overpiggybacks off existing directories and curations of personal, textured web like creating: should somehow encourage people to create interactive elements and then eventually create their own website? i should be enabling a more handmade web... playhtml right now is inherently communal but it doesn’t necessarily have to be i guess? it also makes it easy to just have persistence in general... minecraft - you can visit people’s worlds, you can remix the things people createstooping things from people’s websites and placing them on other people’s websitesan inventory that you can carry aroundleaving interactive gifts for people on their websitefor the owner of the website: e.g. a letter that opens up or a flower that blooms.for visitors to the website: thank you lettersturning existing elements on websites into interactive playhtml elementsmaybe AI can suggest which things would be good (generally images.. or others that feel like distinct “objects”: buttons, ...)to make a game, you must have a websiteprobably does need to have some easier way to make, subdomains from playhtml or somethingor piggyback on things like glitch, neocoties, etc. im not in the business of hosting websites
what difference in what you can do on extension vs websitecore feeling that people should get“wow!” joyful surprise in discovering the game for the first time“wow!” - theres so much life in this to uncover“damn” - there’s so much humanity and stories to learn about here
inventory mechanicrespawn rate or single item, people can define drops on their websitesmoments of vulnerability and emotion that come from thatwhen your hands touch on a webpageinteractions derived from different statedynamic state: number of times watered plantstatic state: number of times word rain is on pagethings that website owners can program / game nounsevents like weather that are user created, programmable probabilities, are imperative and happen in response to a user action, or happen in response to a certain world stateobjects: discrete interact-able things where their interactions affect the game, can be retrievable (items)actions: the set of actions that a player can take with any number of objects, mapped to how they undertake the action.player: a user participating in the game (visiting a website integrated or has the extension installed )cursor: player’s avatar? main form of interaction. can be customized
name optionswe were onlineour internetOnline LivingLiving OnlineTiny Internets
Feedback Request
I’d love feedback around 1) any ideas around questions in the document, 2) what resonates about certain framings, features, or hypotheses, and 3) anything important missing from my priorities or questions.
Please feel free comment liberally throughout the document.
Context
The promise of social media has failed. We have unprecedented levels of connection yet feel more lonely and powerless than we have in decades. It feels as if devices and platforms control us rather than the other way around. A small minority is able to fight through the algorithm to make their livings on top of these platforms, but their situation is precarious, subject to the whims and changes of the system. In the relationships between this powerful minority and their audience, the kind of connection is warped from a normal human-to-human one. They are parasocial and the people they talk to are their audience (and therefore, their market). There can still be authentic connections but they are subject to these underlying currents of capital and value exchange. New social apps rise and fail because they raise ventural funding and can’t make any money to be sustainable. Even established social platforms like Reddit face existential crisis because of the new threat of unauthorized scraping by AI platforms.
In this environment, people are increasingly fleeing from the open internet to closed, exculsive platforms private Discords, forums, and group chats. These spaces are safer at the cost of lacking any serendipity of real world encounters. You have to know someone in order to encounter them in these spaces.
Still, social media platforms are filled with moments of connection and creativity because of all the people that operate them, especially when content comes from people who are not professional influencers, sharing the candid and raw moments of life that they find interesting. And they bring together people from all over the world for small moments of intimate connection that occasionally turn into large, lasting social movements. These people would never encounter each other without the global spread of social media.
I think this potential for serendipity is one of the core social goods of social media. So how do we create platforms that allow for serendipity while protecting against all the value conflicts that form when you have the power of global scale?
Playhtml seeks to preserve the small intimate encounters of the early days of social media but at scale (in global reach, rather than volume).
is an for designing communal internet experiences by enhancing web elements with real-time, collaborative interactivity. playhtml aims to provide the infrastructure for making new diverse and open forms of "social media" that make the web feel alive. By providing the means to shape the way we interact with each other on the web, it invites people to imagine what websites can become and who we can become when we inhabit them.
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Playhtml forms a system of encounters that takes across the entire internet. Encounters and interactions are not artificially limited or hidden according to explicit networks. The distribution is naturally formed by tying interactions to regions of the internet (urls). In many ways, this form of distribution parallels how social interaction unfolds in physical cities, encounters taking place through proximity rather than predetermined rules.
Rather than posting content that is tied to a particular medium (text, image, video), we’re seeking out more expressive and customizable forms of interactions that are native to the web medium. You can think of this as a superset of the mediums as they might include some of these like video (webcam-based) but also open up the set of interactions to things that trigger via live cursors or tapping or by interacting with particular elements on a page. The interactions are more like that of video game worlds rather than what you would imagine physical media being.
How do we make a new paradigm for social media on the open internet, while enabling more diverse, expressive, and customizable forms of human connection and distribution?
FAQ
Traditional social media is focused on global broadcasting, viral scale (in volume). This has led to the gradual change from using social media for casual posting (your lunch, blurry family videos) to using it for curating a portfolio of your life and as a means to gain business. Many new social apps address this by turning away from the open internet into increasingly closed, exclusive, and hidden networks that follow the “group chat” model, like Retro, the “friends-only” network. While these are useful for connecting with your existing community, it loses the appeal of traditional social media in its serendipitous reach.
playhtml is aligned with decentralized social media efforts such as the Fediverse and AT Protocol / Bluesky. However, while they establish the baseline networking infrastructure and recreate popular established formats (microblogging), playhtml is interested in new kinds of interactive and tangible social experiences on the web. These decentralized identities and data storage can be easily integrated into playhtml in the future.
Goals
Strategy
The core strategy is divided into what new features we’ll take on as well as a broader and Strategies. There are also specific top-level interaction consistency questions that remain to be anwered in .
The main current barriers are spread and distribution, ease of integration, and the why someone would want to do this in the first place.
Infrastructure
The core infrastructure is in place for designing and creating communal experiences on the web. There is support for both HTML with no javascript and modern javascript frameworks like React and Next, the simplest interactions are available from a single data attribute on elements (e.g. collaboratively movable elements with can-move ), and there is full expressibility to program a custom interaction with a developer experience that just feels like working with any other local state.
Metrics for Success
Internet Game
an internet-wide game that unfolds across the ever-growing universe of websites participating
The initial inspiration from this idea was how to create an internet environment that has all the emergent properties of city living ecosystems, where phenomena like , , and can sprout and flourish. This exploration will build off of my prior work, called tiny internets, in 2022. is a browser extension that allowed you to hide messages after someone had visited a set of websites (like a digital geocache).
There have been several attempts in the past (and several current attempts all in the web3 space) to create a MMORPG-like game that takes place on the internet via browser extension. Many of the previous ones gained lots of popularity but then failed due to high costs and niche interests. The current ones still seem very niche by focusing on specific market entries like streamers or promoting a high-level global narrative or world. They also face adoption barriers because of their dependence on installing a browser extension.
It's interesting to see how stumbleupon was acquired for $75 million and pmog was dead. they had similar theories about the internet (making the internet fun), but went about it in very different ways. pmog is more experimental and weird, definitely not for everyone, while stumbleupon is more neutral, platform-like, and meant to be invisible. so then its like what do i want playhtml to be? something in between I suppose -- invisible in the sense that it is an interface and empowers people to fill it with _their_ content and creations, but also weird and textured in that it challenges people to use the internet in a different way.
The game should focus on a feeling of fun, engaging stewardship and collaborative world-building in service of a better, more human internet. Playing the game should inspire people to create more textured, personal websites.
What behavior do I want to encourage?
What is the core gameplay loop?
Possible interactions
core questions
game mechanics / audience
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