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!

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 🎤🎸🥁

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 ‘Muni Town’.

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

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 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

Release v0.2 – Handles are Domains · 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.we…

GitHubmuni-town

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?

Muni BlogZicklag

Capabilities & Identity with Leaf

Recently Christine Lemmer-Webber shared her ‘recipe for the fediverse’. Let’s see whether Leaf can meet her requirements.

Muni BlogZicklag

We imagined a non-extractive company together

Weird inc.

Mindfully growing a non-extractive company towards a ‘steward ownership’ end state.

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

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.

Update:

Weird v0.3 - Dreams for sale!

Make a $10 bet on where Weird will be in a year from now, and we will do our very best not to disappoint. Every paying customer is also an automatic stakeholder in the Weird indie enterprise.

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

2025 Q1-Q2: From PESOS to POSSE

Weird's focus for the first half of 2025 will be that of a "data reclamation machine", helping netizens wrestle back control of their content from the walled gardens.

Data Defragmentation

‘Weird the data importer’ is our wedge into the data fortresses keeping our digital identities captive. PESOS - Recenter the publishing pipeline 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 servi…

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

Weird CMS

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

• Rich embeds
• Teams & Projects
• Notion-style sidebar
• Static page generator & Custom themes
• Wiki pages
• 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.

The OG Social Network: Other People’s Websites

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Jim Nielsen’s BlogJim Nielsen

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.

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

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!