The Spritely Institute

The Spritely Institute is running its first ever supporter drive. We could really use your help so we can build the future of secure collaboration and decentralized networked technology! spritely.institute/donate/

End-to-end encrypted relays for OCapN spritely.institute/news/end-to-... Federated, end-to-end encrypted relaying comes to Spritely Goblins and the OCapN protocol! Relays are federated (like email or ActivityPub) but don't know anything about the contents of communication between users!

From our series on the public funding of open source, Jeffrey McGuire explains how the Fediverse was built. www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Featu... @spritelyinst.bsky.social @dustyweb.bsky.social @nlnetlabs.bsky.social #NLNet #NGIZero #Bonfire #DigitalAutonomy #ActivityPub #Fediverse #OpenSource

We're entering spooky season, and here's a neat Halloween-haunted-house-themed game made with Spritely's Hoot Scheme->WASM toolkit by bonthron ! community.spritely.institute/t/hoot-haunt...

Spritely office hours today Wednesday, September 30th at 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Drop by! Say hello! Ask us questions! Tell us what you're building! These are always fun and the conversations are always great! Hope to see you there!

We gave a really well received talk at QCon London: “Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet”, and it's now uploaded publicly! Give it a watch! www.infoq.com/presentation...

Spritely office hours, today (Wednesday, August 26th) at 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! Come talk to us about what we're up to, tell us how you're using Spritely tech, and ask questions! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic...

We're working hard to make it easier to hack on Spritely tech *without* needing to install anything special... just an ordinary browser! Check out this screenshot of the work-in-progress Hoot IDE, featuring a "picture language" generating pretty graphics-inside-code!

Office hours happening now! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic...

Spritely office hours happening today! Coming up real soon (2pm ET)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Talk to us about our projects, your projects using Spritely, ask us questions, etc!

Tomorrow! In Toronto! Come see @flockofbirbs.bsky.social and I talk at Open World Map about how @spritelyinst.bsky.social uses game development and game jams to advance network freedom! luma.com/8nvmyatm It's no cost to attend so register and come hang out with us!

Spritely office hours! Today! At 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Hope to cya there! <3

People keep sending us the article about OpenAI banning "goblins". Spritely does not use generative AI in any of its work. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny that Spritely Goblins, our distributed programming environment, is too cool and easy to obsess over, too powerful. We will not apologize for this

Spritely office hours today! Come hang out, hear what's happening, and talk about what you're working on or interested in! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic...

We’re excited to announce Spritely Goblins 0.18.0! Featuring new caching layer called “sleepy actors”, OCapN protocol updates, and numerous bug fixes! Get cozy by the fire, get a nice cup of tea, and have a relaxing read about this exciting new Goblins release! spritely.institute/news/spritel...

Spritely crew members @dustyweb.bsky.social and @flockofbirbs.bsky.social will be speaking at QCon London 2026 about "Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet" on March 18th! qconlondon.com/presentation...

Spritely Hoot, our Scheme->WASM compiler (and all-around WASM toolkit) hits 0.8.0, and this one is a BIG release! spritely.institute/news/hoot-0-... For the first time you can LIVE develop web applications using Hoot, from the comfort of your own editor! See the video at the top!

Impeccable curation: Right after I talked about 4 ways to ♥️/👿 browsers, @flockofbirbs.bsky.social @spritelyinst.bsky.social is up next saying break up the browser monoliths, browsers should just be a shell for WASM.

Couldn't make it to #FOSDEM? Here's a list of talks by #spritely folks, including me, plus a list of talks I just recommend! social.coop/@cwebber/116...

If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritelyinst.bsky.social We have the skills and underlying tech, but we need resources to fund it. Feel free to reach out.

Coming to #FOSDEM? Come see the #Spritely crew speak! We've got a whole bunch of exciting talks lined up this year! community.spritely.institute/t/spritely-f...

Mandy: ActivityPub on Spritely Goblins! spritely.institute/news/mandy-a... Jessica Tallon, co-author of ActivityPub and Spritely engineer, discusses a proof of concept ActivityPub application combining the actor model properties of Spritely Goblins and ActivityPub alike!

I've said a lot, there's more that can be said, but instead I'll switch to the ask. Does the above resonate with you? @spritelyinst.bsky.social could really, truly use your help. Consider donating. I promise we'll put it to good use. spritely.institute/donate/ Let's build a better internet! 💜

But what does it mean for systems to be social? Here's something you can't do on either ActivityPub or ATProto, but is a demo we built with Goblins and OCapN: a collaborative farming game! spritely.institute/news/goblinv...

And we're still building key infrastructure. Goblins recently got a major upgrade to its persistence system: spritely.institute/news/spritel... And it's about to get another one. Not really yet announced, but we're working on a hot-cache system that loads actors from store on demand. It's neat!

We also recently put out a blogpost and demo of a chat system that *nobody* centrally hosts called "Brassica Chat" spritely.institute/news/composi... You can try on it on the page. It's a demo, but it's a step towards secure communication for a hostile world.

We're big believers in having tangible examples of tech so people can understand and it's not just vaporware. Sometimes that's challenging to do with low-level tech in development. But games are a great way to show things off! Unusually, Spritely has a whole arcade page! spritely.institute/arcade/

We're building cool tech: - Goblins, p2p distributed programming: spritely.institute/goblins/ - Hoot, a WebAssembly toolkit (and Scheme->WASM compiler) spritely.institute/hoot/ - OCapN, a secure distributed p2p networked protocol ocapn.org But... what are we *doing* with these things?

User-empowering technology is a lot of work, corporations aren't motivated to build it. We need research and development of new tech that changes the game from an org that isn't bound by pushing profit. And that's why @spritelyinst.bsky.social is a nonprofit research lab. So... what are we doing?

I love computers. When people say "Computers were a mistake!" it makes me sad. But it's had to blame people. The direction computers have gone in, the experience people largely have had, is a loss of agency and empowerment. How do we bring that back, and do better than ever even?

What can we do? Is there hope? Is it possible to build something better? Spritely was born out of this work, and the strive to create infrastructure allowing for "Networks of Consent". More on that here: spui25.nl/programma/we...

*None* of the decentralized social networks today are robust enough to handle threats facing vulnerable people and activists today. Not the fediverse, not Bluesky/ATProto. What to do? (Here's a talk on that: "Protocols and Purpose in a Global Democratic Crisis" c-tube.c-base.org/w/f9pF5pwxX8... )

@spritelyinst.bsky.social is developing some damn cool tech: Distributed programming! Leading the way on a secure P2P protocol (OCapN)! A WebAssembly toolkit! But: is "cool tech" what matters? *Why* are we trying to make cool tech? What are the *social implications* of making this technology?

For this #GivingTuesday I'm going to make the (biased) argument for why you might consider donating to @spritelyinst.bsky.social, especially if you care about a healthier future for the internet! spritely.institute/donate/ Here's a little thread explaining more... 🧵

Local-first chat using CRDTs meets object capability security using @spritelyinst.bsky.social's tech!

Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types spritely.institute/news/composi... Capability security AND local-first chat?! Two great tastes that taste great together! Plus try our tasty demo, live on the blogpost: Brassica Chat!

If you're in Amsterdam next week, our Executive Director @dustyweb.bsky.social is giving a keynote: "We Can Change the Defaults: Building Networks of Consent and Spaces of Joy in the Ruins of Social Media" spui25.nl/programma/we...

Instead of doing the game jam this time around, we've been making some interesting new demos! And here's GoblinShare: Secure, Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing with Goblins spritely.institute/news/goblins... Combining Goblins, OCapN, and encrypted content addressed storage!

Next Spritely office hours! Today! At 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Cya there!

Next Spritely office hours! Today! At 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Cya there!

New System Crafters today focused on Hoot! www.youtube.com/live/0jvN_qW...

I am SO EXCITED to announce the new release of @spritelyinst.bsky.social Goblins 0.17.0 featuring MAJOR new improvements to our persistence system, including a lightning-fast storage backend called Bloblin! spritely.institute/news/spritel...

Hoot fans! Lisp fans! Rejoyce! Scheme in the browser just got even nicer and cozier to use with Hoot 0.7.0! spritely.institute/news/hoot-0-...

Spritely Goblins v0.17.0: Persistence is better than ever! spritely.institute/news/spritel... Our distributed programming system Goblins has a brand new persistence system named Bloblin which is LIGHTNING fast! Your programs smoothly serialize and BAM, reawaken! Let's go!

It is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to contain the amount of excitement in making this post... We have Shepherd running on Spritely Goblins running ON TOP OF GUIX! See the screenshot! This is HUGE! We just wrote about Goblins + Shepherd a few days ago but progress is SO FAST! spritely.institute/news/shepher...

Double good news about Spritely's Hoot, Our Scheme->WASM compiler! WASM 3.0 released, and Hoot gets a mention! webassembly.org/news/2025-09... AND! iOS updated Safari to support the WASM features we use. Which means you can now play Cirkoban anywhere! files.spritely.institute/embeds/cirko...

Shepherd × Goblins update! spritely.institute/news/shepher... Some of you may know that we've been working on porting Shepherd (Guix's init/daemon manager service) to Spritely Goblins. We're getting close! Things run! We even show off a Goblins + Shepherd powered fleet orchestration in the post!