Erlend Sogge Heggen

Bullish on kindness.  
Founder of Spicy Lobster studios and Weird.
https://weird.one

Formerly VP of Community / Product Lead at Discourse.

#opensource #gamedev #fediverse

Home: https://erlend.sh
GitHub: https://github.com/erlend-sh
Open Source Explained: https://blog.erlend.sh/open-source-explained
Web of the People: https://blog.erlend.sh/web-of-the-people

Public Key

npub1hfwe7ujg3hj3zwt5v9jj8g02pxg67kqfdxsnx955ykl6ev024thqvd4jg3

NIP-05 Address

erlend_at_writing.exchange@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqst5hvlwfygmeg3896xzefr584qnyd0tqykngfnz62zt0avk8424msprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hsk5cr76

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

relay.damus.io

saltivka.org

Author Public Key

npub1hfwe7ujg3hj3zwt5v9jj8g02pxg67kqfdxsnx955ykl6ev024thqvd4jg3

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Last Notes

2025-08-18 19:05:55 UTC

I have colleagues and fellow travelers who use AI tech that I find deeply objectionable, yet it feels wrong to expect them to forgo its usage entirely, especially if the technology can be turned against its own rotten foundations.
https://blog.erlend.sh/non-consensual-technology

2025-05-22 19:01:10 UTC

I think it should be socially acceptable for artists to cold-call anyone they see using AI-art and ask them:
Hey bud! Would you like to commission a $50-$500 drawing of higher quality, made by a human artist you can credit by name as our mutual proof of you being a bond fide Supporter of The Arts?
This is the sort of digital receipt that you should want to wear as a badge on your most punk-looking jacket with pride: I PAID FOR ART.
#art #commons

2025-02-22 12:08:58 UTC

For a lot of us the “simple” prospect of filling in a web page with content presents an insurmountable writer’s block.
For all their flaws, this is in large part why the mainstream social media applications have been so successful:
All it asks for is a blurb, and now we can be WRITERS together 💌
https://blog.muni.town/content-imperative/

2025-02-11 09:20:39 UTC

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have you been in contact with Roost yet?
https://roost.tools
An IFTAS + Roost partnership seems plausible. They’re also gonna be running a CSAM tool:
https://www.platformer.news/roost-open-source-trust-safety/
..so maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to leave that massive infrastructure cost to a better funded institution (they got that AI-bubble money) so IFTAS can focus on advocacy and essentially operate as an amicable watchdog to keep the likes of Roost honest and informed?

2025-02-03 11:38:02 UTC

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yaaay, tyvm! My favorite Internet List 🥰

2025-01-30 10:23:12 UTC

At what point can we agree that having an active presence on X/Twitter is a red flag for an #OSS project?
That place is not just a nazi bar now, it’s their official headquarters with a 24/7 live podium for their supreme leader. gtfo
https://mastodon.social/@itsfoss/113915933903762993

2025-01-28 22:57:24 UTC

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Down the line this has major implications. Among other things, it sets the stage for personal websites that can accept pull requests.
Wouldn't it be great to enlist your trusted readership as a collaborative community-editor?

2025-01-28 22:57:02 UTC

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Weird aspires to be a digital garden for personal web spaces. That means facilitating small beginnings that can mature over time. A key aspect of this is version-controlled documents.
Using the excellent Loro CRDT, we've got a functional demo of 'Git for writing' working.
https://loro.dev/
https://cdn.masto.host/writing/media_attachments/files/113/908/447/443/917/838/original/f93bffd086c15298.mp4

2025-01-28 22:55:22 UTC

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This however is just the beginning of a an intricate scheme.
The end-game is fully moddable websites, like WordPress but more safely sandboxed.
https://github.com/muni-town/weird/discussions/291

2025-01-28 22:53:19 UTC

Three weeks have passed since our public MVP reveal. We're thrilled to report that all 25 early-bird slots have sold out; thank you! 😍
Weird v0.4 is now out! Introducing Themes & Revisions.
https://blog.muni.town/themes-and-revisions/
more below 👇
#weirdone #indieweb #socialweb

2025-01-26 15:54:49 UTC

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this is horrifying.

2025-01-25 22:51:07 UTC

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kult! Jeg skal ikke på FOSDEM dessverre, men vi får prøve oss på dem kaffekoppen i Oslo em dag smart da ☺️

2025-01-25 10:48:44 UTC

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The nascent company in question:
https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113600296697982699

2025-01-25 10:45:46 UTC

✋ hei!
I’d love to get in touch with a lawyer or corporation-savvy person in Oslo/Norway who is interested in things like open source, coops and steward ownership.
Don’t need to be an expert in any of this, just need to be interested in exploring this space together with me in the Norwegian jurisdiction.
https://purpose-economy.org/en/
We’re big on ‘the common good’ here in Norway, but we haven’t done much to enshrine it in law. Someone has to make the first move.
#opensource #legal #finance #oslo

2025-01-20 20:11:42 UTC

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can’t have your planet-sized cake and eat it too 😢

2025-01-20 18:25:54 UTC

“These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (..) then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.”
“To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive – it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.”
by @npub1fdr…lvhs https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/113861019696086103

2025-01-20 08:07:31 UTC

Is there a common practice for how to automatically detect the social icon of a fediverse site-link when adding it to a ‘personal links’ section like in GitHub? We’re trying to implement this for #weirdone
https://github.com/muni-town/weird/issues/294
#fediverse #activitypub #webdev

2025-01-18 13:49:52 UTC

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hmm no, what docs did you derive ipfs from? Oh, the fact that I did a talk at the ipfs conf I guess.
Weird was never based on ipfs, but it has been prototyped using a close cousin, Iroh:
https://blog.muni.town/weird-happenings/
That’s what led us to Willow, which is now a core part of our architecture, whereas Iroh is being relegated to a more optional net-protocol for p2p connectivity.
https://blog.muni.town/leaf-atproto-activitypub/

2025-01-18 08:06:12 UTC

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I had a mixed impression of the term. Before any context I thought ‘uh-oh, do we have a case of web5 type branding here?, but as soon as I read that it stands for peer *for* peer it made complete sense and I like it, heh.

2025-01-15 08:41:30 UTC

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Oooh I didn’t know p2panda had started using @npub1pez…6yrq, that’s great! Ecosystem convergence ftw 💞

2025-01-08 19:13:43 UTC

HOLY MOLY – Weird is now publicly available to all!
Our v0.3 mvp is finally done after a year of development and many more spent pondering cozy community design.
https://blog.muni.town/selling-dreams/
Today it's a minimalistic personal site generator. Before long it'll be a social network made of people's personal websites.
Nerdy web weirdos unite ✊❤️‍🔥

2024-12-15 20:40:23 UTC

We would like to run an #activitypub instance as part of the #weirdone platform, same as the excellent #omglol by [@prami](https://social.lol/@prami )
This instance will be operated as a paid extension of Weird, costing $10/yr ($20/yr after beta).
All member subscriptions will go entirely to the AP instance hosters, which should be a team of at least 2-3 sysadmins & moderators tending to the instance part-time. This is expected to be a fairly low-volume instance since all members are paid (to begin with).
#moderation

2024-11-29 14:16:05 UTC

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forking the official app is tricky because it’s such a fast-moving target that is unlikely to wanna merge such an addition down the road.
There are however efforts like this being discussed for unofficial clients: https://github.com/elk-zone/elk/discussions/3030
Gobo exists as a live open source example as well.
Unfortunately the middle of the venm diagram ‘atproto enthusiast/user’ and ‘ap enthusiast/user’ appears to be so small that no one has decided to pursue this yet.

2024-11-25 23:46:56 UTC

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lol, much appreciated! 🫶
To be clear we had no expectations of direct engagement, we just found your framing/prompts to be a fitting contextual basis from which to explain our own work.
That work does seem to align quite neatly with OCapN et.al., the docs of which we will certainly revisit more attentively in the coming weeks.
zick’s been pondering a nifty WASM-based plugins system as well..

2024-11-24 10:09:44 UTC

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cybermylowerbackhurts

2024-11-23 09:23:56 UTC

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> Decentralized identity on top of ~mutable CAS storage
Is there anything like a spec stub for that somewhere? I think we stand a good chance of checking all these boxes in #leafprotocol by @npub1z53…evsh
https://mastodon.social/@zicklag/113528550574786820

2024-11-19 20:46:39 UTC

Homeownership on the web is highly analogous to the physical world. Modern homeownership is mostly a story of home-rentership, not real ownership.
Incredibly, this matches the online experience, even though the World Wide Web has an infinite amount of real-estate!
You deserve a home on the web that’s built to keep you safe; a magical place for virtual living that‘s yours for life, existing in a sociable web.
https://blog.muni.town/digital-homeownership/
(Now stealth-releasing Weird v0.2 🥷)
#socialweb #weirdweb

2024-11-18 00:24:13 UTC

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speaking of DID methods, I ran into another promising one recently: https://fedid.me/about/

2024-11-03 13:49:49 UTC

Wholeahearted-agree, and @npub1sac…kcpe is well on her way to back such statements up with both science and better practice 💫 https://sfba.social/@neuralgraffiti/113393059427973956

2024-10-23 15:54:50 UTC

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this is excellent and deserves a ‘Are atproto’s PLCs centralized?’ blog post ;)

2024-10-11 11:54:52 UTC

#askmastodon: How much could we get done with a 2 year moratorium on 'frameworks' dev?
I pose this hypothetical as relentless app-framework/engine producer (jMonkeyEngine, Amethyst engine, Bones engine, Leaf protocol..) who would kinda love to just be told from up high: “no more middleware polishing, make the app/game!”.
I’m the guy who’s telling everyone ‘make a game, not an engine’ while relentlessly churning out all engines and no completed games/apps :D
#opensource #framework #apps

2024-09-11 06:54:57 UTC

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and every app that embeds a post with this image insists on making it HUGE.
Heck, most of my articles don’t have any image added, but my blog platform wanted me to add an account image, so now all my posts without a featured image just plasters a supersized image of my face all over that embed instead.

2024-09-01 17:24:42 UTC

Is anyone aware of a #bufferapp alternative for the #opensocialweb & #fediverse?
I’ve found some open source network-agnostic poster interfaces: postiz-app, postybirb, moxpost..
..but none of them specialize in open protocols like ActivityPub, ATProto etc.

2024-08-30 07:00:35 UTC

https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
> Google has built a massive index [20 trillion webpages, 12.5 Petabytes] of the internet that covers close to 100% of the accessible web.
> Since search is a critical but essential resource for all users, the solution we propose is to mandate fair access to the Search Index or to take it a step further, consider treating the Search Index as an “Essential Facility”.
This is how we fight Big Tech monopolies; by reclaiming the information commons that they’ve captured.