Dec 4, 2024 6 min read status-quo

Weird 2025

As it stands today, Weird is best understood as a single-page website generator, i.e. a minimalistic CMS. You put in some basic details about yourself and then, like an html-enchanted llama, Weird will spit out a website!

Our new design for Personal Pages landing shortly, courtesy of Design by Paly Zambrano, Theme Code by zeu.dev

As the end of this year draws near let's take stock of the progress we made in recent months, followed by a roadmap of what's to come when Weird grows from its nascent MVP stage into a 'social network of personal websites'.

We got the bands together 🎤🎸🥁

We released our first single: Weird v0.2 - Handles are Domains

You can currently:

* Add profile information (avatar, description, socials, tags)
* Add links
* Apply a custom domain.

We dove into the technical weeds of the Leaf protocol

One of our important goals with Weird and Leaf is to enable people to own their data, even if they can't self host. Leaf allows people to have all their data, replicated in realtime, on their own device, without the hassle of trying to do a slow "download my data" process every time they want to back it up.

We imagined a non-extractive company together

December

For the remainder of this month, we're strictly focused on two things:

Paid subscriptions
App aesthetics

Those are the only remaining TODOs of the v0.3 release, which is our Minimum Viable Product milestone.

2025 Q1-Q2: From PESOS to POSSE

'Weird the data importer' is our wedge into the data fortresses keeping our digital identities captive.

PESOS - Data defragmentation

PESOS is an acronym for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It's a syndication model where publishing starts by posting to a 3rd party service, followed by an archived copy on your own (Weird) site.

Essentially a microscopic Internet Archive, just for your own digital footprint on the internet. 'Weird: ₱ESOS-edition' aggregates all of your digital personas into a harmonious mosaic, made completely yours by combination of cloud backing and local-first storage.

It's a personal webspaces aggregator.

We've already started working on several importers, and will support many more in the months to come, prioritized by customer demand:

GitHub, GitLab & Forgejo
Mastodon
Bluesky (as a prospective PDS backup/host for Bluesky/ATProto we’re closely following the emerging Account Hosting specs)
Blog RSS
Chat (Discord, Zulip et.al.)
OPML (for sharing blog & podcast feeds)
Read-it-later (Raindrop, Omnivore..)

Once you can combine your webspaces, you also gain the ability to create mashups of topically related content from different sources.

If for example I've shared some half-baked thoughts about 'open source licensing' on my microblogs as well as in some chat rooms, Weird lets me defragment those disparate musings into a coherent train of thought on a single page that can keep pulling in content from several sources.

POSSE - Web sovereigny

The opposite approach is called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

In this model an author publishes original content to their own site and then syndicates copies to 3rd party services. By IndieWeb standards this is the ideal approach, since your ability to publish content is not beholden to a 3rd party.

Setting up a POSSE pipeline however requires not just the right infrastructure (for which conscientious authors like Molly White and Cory Doctorow have bespoke setups), but also a big shift in workflow.

We're so used to posting on the big platforms that flipping that flow on its head can be highly disruptive. Such a transition takes time, and for casual posters it may never be necessary. Most people will probably want a combination of both.

Hence our commitment to both models, starting with the least laborious one.

Weird CMS

To realize the POSSE model, Weird needs native publishing capabilities. We will gradually be working on that track alongside the importers.

Rich embeds
Teams & Projects
Notion-style sidebar
Static page generator & Custom themes
Wiki CRDT (like a git-for-writing) with Loro
Private spaces (Meadowcap / willow-rs)

Late 2025: Weird Webrings

Around half-way through 2025, we're hoping to shift some of our attention away from Weird as an individualistic publishing tool to Weird as a network engine.

We think there's massive untapped potential in the web 1.0 concept of webrings, and we fully intend to bring them back.

That will entail:

Giving every single online-person their own website (on Weird, Bluesky, Mastodon, omg.lol, Neocities...)
Incrementally working out ways for those websites to ping 👈each👉 other.

All of this culminates in one of the key motivations behind the Weird project: A Network of Shared Purpose. Much more on that another day.

Anywhoozles, brace yourselves for 2025!