Weird v0.3 - Dreams for sale!

We stealthily released v0.2 a month ago, tied in at the end of our latest musings on web agency.

Digital Homeownership

You deserve a home on the World Wide Web that’s built to keep you safe; a magical place for virtual living that‘s yours for life, existing in a sociable web.

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

As explained therein, I'm already getting great value from Weird in its nascent MVP stage as a personal-page generator. Weird has helped me put my root custom domain into active use, thus taking up space on the web as a sovereign individual.

Today, the cornerstone of my re-constructed web-identity has been placed firmly in the ground!

erlend.sh 🪨

After 35 years of living, ~25 of them as a netizen, I finally have my very own front door on the interwebs. Now the POSSE journey begins in earnest.

Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet

The year is 2025. The internet in the shape that we’ve known it in the early 2000s is no longer there. Or, not quite in the shape that we’ve seen it before. This is not just plain nostalgia talking - the vibrant ecosystem of blogs, feeds, personal sites, and forums has been usurped by a few mega-con…

Den Delimarsky

I paid $10 for the privilege. That's the all-important feature added in this release: accepting payments. (Shoutout to the excellent Polar.)

Paid Subscription: Weird Nerd

The earliest of Early Adopters can now buy one year of our Weird.one premium service - affectionately named 'Weird Nerd' - for the low-low price of $10 (80% off!) for your first year and $25 (50% off) for the next.

For the remainder of our Beta-stage into mid 2025, subscriptions will cost $25/yr.

To buy a subscription, you need to:

1. Register on Weird.one
2. Go to your profile at weird.one/yourname
3. In the bottom left you'll find 'Manage Subscription'

(We're well aware that it could be more streamlined; working on it!)

A note on domain names

All new signups get four random numbers added to their account name, like yourname7788.weird.one

We do this because Weird aspires to be a high-trust network that strictly minimizes inauthentic activities. The numerical suffix is one of several measures against anti-social behavior such as domain-squatting and bot registrations.

This is doubly important in a pluralistic social web in which people who sign up for a free sub-domain on Weird may want to use that as their username on e.g. Bluesky as well; we want all accounts representing our community to be authentic and trustworthy.

Right now the only way to claim a non-numerical username is to buy a subscription. However, in the near future we will also enable free users to unlock this perk by having their trust level elevated, as a result of pro-social behavior that verifies their positive intent in the network.

Paying for a dream

If unlike lil ol' me you need a bit more from Weird to get tangible value out of it, that's to be expected at this first MVP stage. But hear us out:

Make a $10 bet on where Weird will be in a year from now, and we will do our very best not to disappoint. Pilot customers always have an outsize influence on a new product's direction. In particular, we'll be building whichever data importers our first active members are asking for.

Every paying customer is also an automatic stakeholder in the Weird indie enterprise, similar to how the Subvert coop functions. How exactly that will work is for the early adopters to decide.

A fellow nerd recently asked me:

What's your ambition, ultimately, with Weird?

My response:

I want Weird to be my digital ‘soul pod’. It’s the digitized me; the source from which all of my other digital being springs forth.

Web Portals

A personal website is a lot like those door-portals in Monsters, Inc. that magically pipe personal homes into a vast, invisible network existing in another dimension, made real by the vividness of our imaginations.

And, spoiler alert, such a magical network of colorful characters can only be sustained by playing mutualistic (win-win) rather than antagonistic (win-lose/lose-lose) network games.

Anyone signing up for the Weird 'social network' today will notice something unusual: There's no feed on weird.one. No firehose. Not even a connect button.

We are very intentionally starting our co-creation of a weird web by merely occupying web-space together; there's no content-production imperative.

Only after grounding our digital selves will we introduce connectivity bit-by-bit, carefully connecting doors together by peer consent. We intend to go slow enough that all participants in the Weird-net experiment can appreciate the full implications of opening doorways into their digital home🚪

Coming next to our little corner of the weird web, roughly in this order:

• Custom themes
• Collaborative writing (CRDT)
• Login with Bluesky (ATProto)
• Private content
• Teams and Projects (👈this is where the socializing begins in earnest)