There is more honesty in failing for the sake of ideals than in winning without them. It is a story that shaped many before and will shape many after, and mu may simply be one more instance of that enduring truth.
Hey! I think I actually posted this some days ago and it went nowhere. I keep looking for feedback but you know one of those karmic things, we don't always get it when we want it but maybe when we need it.
I guess I just look at the way tech is now and feel disappointed. Its very addictive, "social" yet lonely. I don't find the alternative networks like Reddit, Mastodon, etc much better. I have held off doing anything, cut back most of my social usage but still found problems and years ago, yes I tried to make this idea work and shut it down. But I've felt like I really needed a solution, and so I use this everyday as an alternative to other forms of media consumption. And the hope is longer term it continues to develop as a useful utility. I'll keep investing time in, slowly iterating, figuring out what works and what doesn't. I'm not looking to gamify it or seeking fame or notoriety. Tbh, if it stays small great, if I can figure out how to make "conversational networks" [1] work even better. Anyway, happy to answer questions.
I've been catching myself thinking about this idea for the last two years. Maybe it's my old obsession with PKI and "personal digital infrastructures" that were both promised to us in the early days of the commercial Internet, but never turned concrete for various reasons.
IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services like email, posts, tasks, chat, IM etc. but implemented in a way that all data would be portable to other services (open standards) and its storage would be "bottomless", meaning that users wouldn't have to worry about storage limitation for photos/videos for instance, as they would be sharing resources with other nodes worldwide. There would have to be some monetary incentive(s), of course, but they would be secondary to the bigger cause of keeping a true cyber interconnected community outside big tech.
Uses Go, a language written by and maintained by Google [1]. Uses co-pilot written by GitHub for development [4].
Mu is £11 a month and you cannot see any screenshot of what you are getting [2], the same price you could buy a cheap VPS for [3]. The two authors of the project are asim and co-pilot. The commits have meaningless messages [4].
I think that this could be marketed a lot better. The website has no information at all and it's not possible to work out what the project is from it. The github readme does contain a lot more information but it's still not presented very well. The "Overview" section needs to clearly explain what the project is rather than just stating the motivation for the project. I was able to determine what the project is only by reading the whole readme and piecing it together.
The membership is unclear also: it says "try for free" which makes me suspect I will only be able to use it for limited time before needing to pay, but you only need to pay to support the project and early access. Seems like a lot of potential users will be lost because they get the impression it's a subscription service.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 26.6 ms ] threadI guess I just look at the way tech is now and feel disappointed. Its very addictive, "social" yet lonely. I don't find the alternative networks like Reddit, Mastodon, etc much better. I have held off doing anything, cut back most of my social usage but still found problems and years ago, yes I tried to make this idea work and shut it down. But I've felt like I really needed a solution, and so I use this everyday as an alternative to other forms of media consumption. And the hope is longer term it continues to develop as a useful utility. I'll keep investing time in, slowly iterating, figuring out what works and what doesn't. I'm not looking to gamify it or seeking fame or notoriety. Tbh, if it stays small great, if I can figure out how to make "conversational networks" [1] work even better. Anyway, happy to answer questions.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11714
IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services like email, posts, tasks, chat, IM etc. but implemented in a way that all data would be portable to other services (open standards) and its storage would be "bottomless", meaning that users wouldn't have to worry about storage limitation for photos/videos for instance, as they would be sharing resources with other nodes worldwide. There would have to be some monetary incentive(s), of course, but they would be secondary to the bigger cause of keeping a true cyber interconnected community outside big tech.
Uses Go, a language written by and maintained by Google [1]. Uses co-pilot written by GitHub for development [4].
Mu is £11 a month and you cannot see any screenshot of what you are getting [2], the same price you could buy a cheap VPS for [3]. The two authors of the project are asim and co-pilot. The commits have meaningless messages [4].
I would run a million miles away from this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)
[2] https://github.com/asim/mu
[3] https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/
[4] https://github.com/asim/mu/commits/main/
The membership is unclear also: it says "try for free" which makes me suspect I will only be able to use it for limited time before needing to pay, but you only need to pay to support the project and early access. Seems like a lot of potential users will be lost because they get the impression it's a subscription service.