Bits isn’t a SaaS business where a exhaustively-documented closed source product development process driven by demos and customer interviews trumps all.
We are building infrastructure for a more egalitarian society. Throughout history, ruling elites have captured power—pharaohs, emperors, despots. Technology promised liberation, but a nepotistic leisure class of Harvard-educated tech billionaires has captured that value instead.
Bits empowers everyone equally by placing transformative technology in the hands of the majority. Much like Signal, Wordpress of old, and Linux we aim to make it trivial for individuals to connect, exchange goods and services, and to do so without minoritarian interference.
This mission brings a clarity to our approach. Accessibility and censorship resistance are paramount. Ease of use and flexible deployment options are pivotal.
What does this mean in practice?
Python, Ruby, and JVM-based languages all suffer from the same deployment complexity whereby disparate files and arcane executables come together via POSIX paths, ecosystem-specific load paths and classpaths, and custom package managers.
Projects like uv aim to save us from Python dependency hell. Bundler made
working with Ruby less painful. Clojure has Leiningen, Boot, and tools.deps. All
of this incidental complexity is overwhelming and unnecessary.
Rust cannot sidestep the complexity of compilation, and is woefully inadequate relative to any Lisp with REPL-driven development, but my productivity and needs must come second to the experience of the community I hope to build.
Running Bits for yourself should be as simple as:
./bits serve --port 3142App Stores limit distribution relative to web browsers, and impose extreme financial duress versus direct payment. The prevalence of browsers and HTTP make it an obvious choice for connecting a globally-distributed community.
Unfortunately, modern browsers building on top of the combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other multimedia benefit from the use of build tools such as Vite.
Having built web applications at a time when jQuery didn’t exist, I am acutely aware that reactivity, state management, and excellent user experiences require abstraction to be practical.
I will avoid a lengthy comparison of frameworks and technologies here. SvelteKit is highly efficient, well established, and effective at delivering such experiences.
PostgreSQL is open source, widely supported (cPanel, Neon, cloud providers), and eliminates the SQLite → PostgreSQL migration pain that plagues self-hosted tools like Gitea.
For those unable or unwilling to manage PostgreSQL themselves, hosted instances will be available. For those who can, sovereignty through self-hosting is straightforward.
We find ourselves in a world of tech titans and gargantuan platforms that herd the masses like the tax cattle of old. These established institutions leveraged carefully can accelerate our progress. Think of the vine that ascends the tree to reach sunlight faster than any other.
Bits runs anywhere: ./bits serve on your hardware, or use existing
infrastructure like Cloudflare, Hetzner, or cPanel to accelerate deployment.
We build for the tree, but offer vines to those who want them.
Individuals control their experience. Instance operators set policies for their communities. We provide tools, not mandates.
During my time working on social networks with content creators I worked on applying human social circles to audience cultivation. One’s inner circle are most trusted, and one might permit those people to populate a feed or inbox. Over time, examples of behaviour justify either pulling or pushing someone closer. This geometric idea of scoring users with boundary conditions is something we’ll explore in more detail.
I want to make clear my personal position on what is acceptable and what is not.
Firstly, I am an anarchist. What that means to me is I have zero respect for institutions. I respect individuals, I respect nature, I respect the laws of our objective reality. I consider companies, churches, countries, castes, and governments to be nothing more than man-made inventions that all too often undermine humanism and subject people to entirely avoidable kafkaesque experiences. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone excuse abhorrent behaviour by saying “it’s in the company’s best interest”.
I believe we are all entitled to our own beliefs, but that our beliefs are not sacred and should stand up to criticism. My aforementioned beliefs regarding companies are loosely held and open to challenge.
Informed consent and mutual respect. There’s a time and place to challenge one another. If you publish an opinion, you invite a response. If you want quiet, you must be silent yourself. We may all shout into the void. I want to build tools to help surface signal and manage the noise.
Only through curiosity and kindness can we understand one another and progress as a species.
If I build Bits correctly, I cannot stop unethical actors from using Bits. In much the same way locks on doors, encrypted messages, and anonymous online accounts enable unethical behaviour, people with different values to my own could use the technology I am building to do things I would consider deplorable.
I cannot know that my ethics are objectively valid. I believe the categorical imperative makes sense. I believe informed consent inhibits abuse. I believe abuse is bad. It is apparent the universe itself allows for any such behaviour and others may disagree with what I consider to be right.
I also believe humans are fundamentally good. We are capable of great acts of kindness and creativity. We are the universe experiencing itself – a beautiful inevitability of a stochastic set of natural laws that counteract the pervasive progress towards higher entropy. We build sandcastles knowing the world will erase them, making way for the next generation to leave their mark.
I hope my contributions through Bits will empower a great number of people to manifest wonderful creations and share them with the world.
In practice, this means:
- Export/import of all data to enable true portability
- Custom domain support so your identity survives platform changes
- Open APIs enabling alternative clients and integrations
- Transparent policies: instance operators state their rules, users choose accordingly