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rhizome microgrant
Network Commons supports projects that reimagine how we gather, connect, and interact. We welcome proposals for physical spaces enhanced by digital tools, online communities with strong offline components, and the models for connection that venture into the realm of the unexpected.
We're interested in artists and technologists who are building and owning their own infrastructure—whether that's hosting servers, building small-scale social platforms, or developing speculative protocols for community interactions. Artists who examine and amplify case studies of 'in-between' digital environments such as YouTube comment threads, readme.txt files, and Venmo payment descriptions, are also encouraged to apply!.
Is it human nature to find intimacy even in the tiniest interactions? Rather than accumulating followers, what role does the modern artist play as a community facilitator? Can we reclaim the ways we meet? Are there gathering places that resist the surveillance and addiction cycles of mainstream platforms?
(small, intimate groups, gathering places, temporary homes, alt social media, p2p networks, diy infrastructure, file exchange)
Apply to Network commons + opt-in to additional funding for the ‘open internet’ category.
A big reason we don’t have more interesting “social media” on the open web is because of an obscure default technical configuration called CORS, which automatically limits interactions by domain. Rather than a social media that plays out across multiple personal websites, we get everyone talking on on limited profiles created by platforms. At the same time, the multiplayer interactions we are familiar with lack imagination because it is so hard to create the infrastructure that enables programming them.
Project Proposal
Tell us about your project and how the grant award would help you achieve it (Please don’t exceed 750 characters!).
Traditional social media comes with platform lock-in and a need to accrue following. Instead, I imagine an archipelago of interconnected but independent websites that blends the shared experience of physical third spaces with the web’s distributed scale.
archipelago is infrastructure for creating communal spaces on the open internet, built on playhtml, an open-source library for making collaborative elements. Website owners can program social interactions that unfold across multiple websites in real-time. Built to be unopinionated and universally compatible, it enables new kinds of collective play while preserving personal expression.
The award will fund the development and hosting costs to run the infrastructure as a free public good.
Even with the rise of social media platforms, webrings and personal websites are still some of the most rich, personal digital spaces that exist and thrive in hidden corners of the internet. They are limited from wider access by their scale, reach, and dynamic interaction models. What if these could form the backbone of a new kind of social media that transcends network domain boundaries?
I imagine a world where social media naturally unfolds on the open internet across the millions of websites that already exist rather than being concentrated on a few dominant platforms.
archipelago is infrastructure for creating communal internet spaces across websites.
This project will build off playhtml, a free, open-source platform I built to facilitate real-time stateful interactions, such as collaborative website furniture. Through the project, I want to develop a tool that enables more expressive and embodied forms of interaction across personal domains, so we can get the best of individual personalization and collective play.
The award will fund the labor and software costs of providing this infrastructure as well as funding interesting implementations from the community.
Instead of walled gardens and skyscrapers as the social interaction of today’s internet looks like, I picture an archipelago of interconnected websites. An internet that is more like an open-world video game, actively created by its players, rather than a closed system.
Sketch
Feel free to upload one media file to supplement your written project proposal. All Media types Accepted (10MB size limit)
omg upload an html file that shows a diagram & live interactions
ultimately, functions as a way to:
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