We get excited by new Holochain projects, especially ones we (as non-devs) can play with and experience! Lightningrod Labs, started by Holochain co-founder Eric Harris-Braun, has been working on a suite of Holochain Applications (hApps) that are core infrastructure applications for collaboration. The initial platform design was called “WE”, and Anita has been awaiting the opportunity to review it for this newsletter. Well…now we’ve learned that “WE” has had a major upgrade and is now being called “The Weave” with its first reference frame, “Moss”. And, yes, we’ve been playing with it!!! Get ready to have some fun!
What is The Weave?
The Weave creates a way to create all kinds of “social agreement units and weaving them together in a meaningful and easy-to-use way.” Think of it as a much more advanced Google Workspace where groups can use collaborative tools like document editors, spreadsheets, and drawing tools to create online productivity spaces that suit their needs.
Social Context Units can be thought of as message threads, documents, and video calls - the intellectual assets of your group. By identifying these ‘things’ as units, the Lightningrod Labs team has formulated a way to address each of these unique assets to encourage collaboration.
-Allows groups to embody their social context without any centralized structure
-Enables collaboration with fit-for-purpose group-ware Tools
-Makes “own your data” real by design
-Allows you to search all of your data across the groups you are part of
-Grows with network-effects as Tools are added to the ecosystem
-Centers groups and their members, not large corporate silos
The Weave’s specialized “Weave Interaction Pattern”, is an open standard for creating, searching, linking, and organizing these social context units into a complex social fabric.
If you’d like a more technical description of The Weave and why it’s important, check out the quote from Eric Harris-Braun at the end of this article!
Why is the Weave different from existing options?
Being built using Holochain it benefits from the peer-to-peer, agent-centric framework which enables Weave users to maintain control of their data and manage permissions as they see fit, without needing to use any centralised services.
What makes The Weave unique?
As documents are created, messages are shared or spreadsheets built, each is saved to your DHT with a unique address called a “Weave Asset Locator” (WAL).To facilitate collaboration you can use these WALs when you want to share something in a different applet within the same DHT.
Using The Weave’s ‘Pocket’ function, somewhat like a clipboard that saves links, you can select the unique WAL identifier to import an asset into a new applet context.
Imagine you’re working on something in Notebooks, you join a video call using Presence, and want to discuss what you’ve been writing. Using the streamlined pocket functionality; you click the link button in Notebooks to copy your note’s WAL, then in Presence you open your Pocket, select your note’s WAL, and it opens for everyone to work on in real-time.
Being able to address any ‘asset’ within the Weave means users have the benefit of collaborating in ways that make sense to them using the tools appropriate to their needs. This functionality might appear routine but remember this is all taking place in a distributed, peer-to-peer environment. No data is being stored on central servers, everything is being hosted and handled on local devices.
What can you do with The Weave/Moss?
Currently, the following Tools, or applets, are available to add to the group space:
Kando - real-time Kanban boards
Talking Stickies - real-time digital ‘post-it’ notes
Gamez - design and play board games
Notebooks - real-time collaborative note-taking
How - tooling for content and process alignment
Slate - Excalidraw-based canvas
Vines - Group conversations and messaging
Files - file-sharing and sending
Where - group self-awareness
Snapmail - p2p email
Presence - video calling
Watertable - Airtable Clone
Xylem Spreadsheets - Programmable Spreadsheets
And more are planned!
Current development and feedback
The Weave/Moss is currently in an early Alpha release, so there are known bugs that are being worked on. The developers have created a lovely interface, use the Feedback button on the menu on the left, so you can let them know about any bugs you find too. You’ll also find the hApp development plans, grouped by priority, there as well.
Where is the data hosted?
Each new Group created in The Weave has its own DHT, which is hosted on the members’ computers.
Libraries
Starting with a blank sheet can be both inspiring and sometimes daunting. As a peer-to-peer application framework, Holochain is all about sharing knowledge, skills, and value. As you would expect, The Weave embodies these principles by allowing users to share templates of their assets, whether they’re KanBan layouts, game designs, or “Where” maps. Interestingly the libraries will be hosted on a ‘public’ DHT and invites will be offered to all users.
Future Plans
During our chat with Eric, he touched on the idea of open or public DHTs and WALs. As any asset can be addressed using a WAL, if you were to share the address outside of your group’s DHT you cross the permission boundary or membrane of the group. Eric tells us this functionality is currently in development, working on the complexity around maintaining the appropriate permissions. This brings to mind the ability to share what groups want, publicly, from inside their own DHT; it could be videos, images, messages, Presence invites, the list goes on.
Our Experience
Sam and Anita had the pleasure of testing Moss and getting a guided tour from Zippy (Eric Harris-Braun). Anita’s reaction was that it’s a game changer for community builders and networkers. And being able to link to resources throughout one’s own personal online Moss space…heaven! Inspired by the synergies made possible by cross-DHT WALs, Sam had ideas of libraries of groups indexed by any parameter imaginable; group interest, topic or theme, size, activity level. Using a publicly accessible DHT the libraries could act as an external facing portal for groups to offer insight and invites into their groups - like Facebook groups or Discord servers but truly decentralised!
How can we support Lightningrod Labs and The Weave?
Lightningrod Labs is most interested in having online Community Leaders/Activators start a test group in this pre-Alpha stage.
If you’d like to start a community group, here are the steps:
Visit https://theweave.social/moss/. Download the Moss hApp onto your computer, and start to play with adding the Applets.
Click on the Moss icon at the top of the menu on the right.
Click ‘+Create Group’ to start a new Group of your own.
Click ‘+Add Applet’
Choose the applets you want to play with and the Group(s) you’d like to add them to.
Each group (and therefore DHT) has a unique invite code allowing members to invite new people. Initially, you’ll be in a DHT of your own, share an invite to it with your friends.
As you find bugs or have features you’d like to see built, be sure to click the ‘Feedback’ tab on the left of the application frame.
Occasionally error messages can be thrown up, we’ve found that leaving the hApp to do its thing for a few minutes or using the ‘reload’ option (found in the ‘View’ menu at the top of your screen) helps.
Note: Be aware that The Weave, and therefore Moss, is in a pre-Alpha state, and is subject to updates and changes. Be sure to backup any work/data (using the gear symbol) that you may want to save, because it may not be there when an update occurs!
The hAppenings Community Test Group
We’re excited to see how we can collaborate and test this amazing new hApp together.
Currently, The Weave relies on community responses rather than moderation tools to ensure a safe space for users. We do ask that those joining be of good intent, and behave kindly towards each other, thanks!
If you’d like to join us, here are the steps:
Visit https://theweave.social/moss/. Download the Moss hApp onto your computer, and start to play with adding the Applets.
Click on the Moss icon at the top of the menu on the left.
Select ‘🔒Join Group’, and there you can paste the invite below.
Copy the Invitation Code and paste it into Moss:
https://lightningrodlabs.org/we?we://group/68c7372a-48d4-42ea-94b0-3a9b86ffddc1
Click on the Moss icon at the top of the menu on the left again to ‘+Add Applets’ you’d like to try with us! Remember it can take some time for the hApp to update with new applets.
The Weave may be updated at any time, so we can’t be sure how long the above invite will be valid as hApp updates may require us to build a new group (and therefore change the DHT).
And, since Moss is in pre-Alpha, please back up any work you’d like to save!!
We are more than thrilled with the introduction of “The Weave” and “Moss” into the Holochain Ecosystem!! Sam and I will definitely be playing/working with it with great glee!
Enjoy!!!!
Sam & Anita
Here’s that technical quote from Eric Harris-Braun that we mentioned earlier!
“IP added the ability to deliver data anywhere without a per-data-unit delivery cost. This was pretty much the first time on the planet that that existed. And it was intentional. Unlike previous networking protocols, pricing was left out of the protocol on purpose (I've heard David P. Reed talk about the conversations in the room at DARPA when he was designing the protocols). The consequences of that are seldom talked about but huge. But, the point here is that IP doesn't deliver that value to end users. It took a couple other protocols and technical conventions added on top of the stack to do that: SMTP & MIME Types and RFC 822. Those three together are what we know as email, which is the true mother app of the internet.
Similarly HTTP delivers the possibility of no per-unit-cost in publishing data and deep value that disintermediating publishing companies has created in the world. But HTTP by itself isn't really enough for "The World Wide Web" to exist. Also necessary are the protocols and standards of HTML and the URI/URL, and eventually things like CSS and Javascript and the DOM which are needed for real Web Browsers to work well enough. Holochain, it I believe, is a technical protocol for delivering social-contexts in a disintermediated way. Currently the delivery of social-contexts has turned out to be an absolutely critical and incredibly lucrative function. Google, Facebook, Github, Discord, Slack: these are all companies who provide the value of managing a social context on behalf of groups, by wrapping that around beautiful Web UIs and lots of server capacity.
Holochain provides a way of delivering social contexts in a safe and secure way where the members of the groups themselves provide all the hosting infrastructure, and thus can spin up the social contexts at will and without paying either the monetary cost (SAAS fees), or attention costs (advertising), or enshitification costs of vendor lock-in. However, Holochain is quite low-level, because what it provides is the fabric for creating lots of small units of social context. Each Holochain DNA is a once such social-context, it's a set of "rules-of the game" of a social context. Just like IP or HTTP alone, that's not enough for powerful end-user experience. Notice that each of those items actually don't deliver of that end-user experience until a bunch of extra protocols have been added on top of the base one. This is why you haven't yet seen what you are wanting and describe in that list. But... this is where The Weave comes in. It is our attempt to gather the necessary additional conventions together and implement a solution for a Frame that weaves together the different types of small social-context units, into a fabric that's really useful for end-users. Specifically it includes a pattern for spinning group membranes (which is one kind of social context) and mixing that with functional tools (each of which is another kind of social context) and then creating linking composability of the coherent parts of the social context of those tools (which we call Assets). This latter part is the equivalent of the incredible value of the URL in the context of HTTP and HTML documents. But here the links are to coherent functional units within social context, not just any kind of deliverable content.
Adding new Tooling is easy, and happens on the edges, so the network effects of value add to the ecosystem are simply stunning. Currently it's very expensive to create a web-app. That's because as a software company your app has to re-build the tooling for creating and holding a social context each time. You also have to find a business model that can pay for the server costs as you scale, which is really hard. You typically also have to keep re-inventing over and over again very standardly expected functionality: e.g. how many people have added "commenting" to their app. This should be assembleable not by devs adding and NPM package, but by end-users just dropping in a thread from their chosen chat tool anywhere. In the Weave, it is.” - Eric Harris-Braun
More Links
Eric Harris-Braun’s blog - Flow
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