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

Weird Roadmap

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.

MVP v0.3.0 · Issue #2 · 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 as…

GitHubmuni-town

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.

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.

Citation NeededMolly White

The poster’s guide to the internet of the future

The best of blogging meets the best of social media.

The Verge

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.

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!