March 31st, 2014

Welcome!

We're very excited to welcome you to the blog for TapestryMaker, a diversity-friendly open-source social network platform.

My name's Jon 1, and I first started working on TapestryMaker to create a new online home for me and my friends. All we want is a beautiful friendly place where we can hang out and meet new people; with a vibe that's intersectional feminist, pro-LGBTQ, values diversity and privacy; where the experience looks the way we want it; and where we're seen as people with rights instead of product to be packaged and sold. Is that too much to ask?

Of course not. There are already sites like Dreamwidth out there that come close to those goals. But it turns out that's not really all we want.

We also want all the functionality we can get from Twitter (status updates), Facebook (likes, sharing links and videos, events), Google (collaborative editing like Google docs and spreadsheets, video meetings like Hangouts), forum sites (threaded discussions), Instagram, Tumblr, tribe.net, Pinterest, and our other favorite social networks.

Without the ads and tracking of course.

And prettier!

Oh, and since so many of our friends and acquaintances are on those other sites and most of them aren't moving any time soon, we also want to follow and participate in discussions there as well. And encrypted email and text messaging would be nice too.

Okay, this is starting to be a lot to ask :)

As far as I can tell, there isn't a site like this out there yet. And with my entrepeneurial hat on, hmm: a beautiful diversity-friendly open-source social network platform with this kind of functionality would also enable lot of other interesting things -- and there are a lot of good open source packages that are potential building blocks and allies.

So last fall I started prototyping2 to get more of an idea about what it will take to build the kind of site we want. TapestryMaker (the working name for the software) is still at a very early stage, and our online home is very much a work in progress. Still, early results are encouraging; and when I describe the possibilities, lots of people get excited. So it feels like we're on to something.

As things move forward, we'll be discussing everything from the vision to the architecture to the planning and prioritization. We'll also talk about related topics like diversity and technology, privacy and civil rights, software engineering, blogging, and social networks ... and probably some random other topics as well :)

Thanks for checking us out. Stay tuned for more!

jon

  1. More on my background here. My personal blog at Liminal States gives an idea of my interests. Liminal States has been fairly quiet for the last few years, and I'm excited to get back to blogging!

  2. using node.js, express, passport.io, jade, and jquery! It's been a while since I've written this much code, and I'm also excited to get back to programming :)