6 min read

Weird 2025

Weird 2025
'Hillside Village' by Daeniee

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 zeudev

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 šŸŽ¤šŸŽøšŸ„

Welcome to Muni Town
By now our community holds space for dozens of builders working on community tools in service of the Open Social Web. We call this expansive community space ā€˜Muni Townā€™.

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.
Digital Homeownership
You deserve a home on the World Wide Web thatā€™s built to keep you safe; a magical place for virtual living thatā€˜s yours for life, existing in a sociable web.
Release v0.2 ā€“ Handles are Domains Ā· muni-town/weird
We just finished the next release of Weird! This release makes it so that user handles are always domains. When you sign up, you can simply pick a name and it will give you a handle like zicklag.weā€¦

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.
Leaf, ATProto and ActivityPub
How does Leaf compare to AtProto and ActivityPub?
Capabilities & Identity with Leaf
Recently Christine Lemmer-Webber shared her ā€˜recipe for the fediverseā€™. Letā€™s see whether Leaf can meet her requirements.

Weird Roadmap

December

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

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

MVP v0.3.0 Ā· Issue #2 Ā· muni-town/weird
MVP (v0.3) Signup/Login Link lists Static site renderer hosted service scraper edit in-place certbot Taking names integration Social site importer automated profiles (github, linkedin..) Domains asā€¦

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 ā‚±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:

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.

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world
A simple technique offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party platforms.
The posterā€™s guide to the internet of the future
The best of blogging meets the best of social media.

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.

POSSE illustration by Tantek.
POSSE illustration by Tantek.

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.

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.

The OG Social Network: Other Peopleā€™s Websites
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

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

Federated Webrings
In the glory days of web 1.0, social websites would prominently link out to their digital neighbors via lists known as webrings; magical doorways to an expansive hinterland of digital villages.

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 šŸ‘ˆeachšŸ‘‰ 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!