The year was 2020 — the distant past. I had just had my classically liberal political philosophy beaten out of me with a stick. Joe Biden, the man who ran his campaign from his basement using the tagline "No Malarkey" was challenging the Drumpf for the highest office in the land. I had left the surveillance hellscape that is Facebook behind 4 years prior, but Twitter, I never expected it of you.
Long story short: you know what happened. Did Biden steal the election? Would Trump have won if the NY Post article hadn't been suppressed? These are questions that history is not likely to answer. But was social media acting as a propaganda arm of the state? Yeah.
Follow the White Rabbit
So in November 2020, I tried to answer for myself the question: "What alternatives to Twitter are there"?
See, I won't name names here, but my local church community had gotten some press from a handful of large mainstream media outlets in the months leading up to the election, mostly related to our protestation of Covid tyranny and the hysteria that fueled it. These protests culminated in a couple of arrests, all of which were (years) later thrown out by a federal judge as being clearly in violation of our first amendment rights.
So you might see how I would be concerned about what we Christians would refer to as "persecution" coming down the pike, beginning with our freedom of speech. Luckily, the rot has advanced more slowly than I originally feared, and we are not all residents of the gulag as yet. I know some people would laugh at this, saying that Christians are privileged and dominant in our western world. To them, I would say: "fasten your seat belt Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye."
My survey of Twitter alternatives wasn't encouraging. While I didn't go as deep as Rabble, I think I hit most of the high points, the highest of which was Scuttlebutt, which has some hard limits to scaling. So I shrugged my shoulders and said, "hopefully somebody comes up with a solution".
I guess I'll do it
A year later, I did another survey of the decentralized social media space, and it looked exactly the same. At that point I realized "hey, I'm somebody", and in January 2022 I wrote the Blazepoint white paper. In it, I outlined the problems with current social media alternatives, and an innovative way to solve them using a novel multi-master architecture! I knew this was a huge project with an approximately 0% chance of success, so I committed to working on it for the next ten years.
Of course, unknown to me our good friend fiatjaf was already laboring away on a very similar protocol named after an ostrich or something. Two weeks or so after I wrote my white paper I came across Nostr, which had a very similar design. After unsuccessfully attempting to convince fiatjaf (via an extremely buggy DM implementation on branle) that my protocol was better, I went back to refining my protocol on my free nights and weekends.
If you look at the Blazepoint repository, you can see that the last commit was on May 23rd, 2022. Life had gotten busy, and while I still fully intended to keep my commitment to myself, as it turns out building a protocol by yourself is not easy. So in November of 2022 I threw in the towel, and dove headfirst into Urbit!
No, Just Kidding
I lasted about four hours with Urbit before thinking "ain't nobody got time for this". My resistance to the allures of Nostr folded, and over Thanksgiving break while my kids hung out with my wife and her family, I sat in a freezing RV feverishly coding the first version of Coracle. If you want to play around with it, you can still access it at here. I also have a screencast uploaded here. It basically works!
Late in the week, I pushed my work in progress to Github, and immediately got a message from fiatjaf about it. He wanted to see my work! It wasn't at all ready, but I deployed it and showed it off.
Everyone was very complimentary, which made me even more motivated to work on it. That kicked off 5 months (and counting) of waking up at 4 AM multiple times a week so I could put in more time.
The rest, as they say, is history. Jack followed me on Twitter, and tweeted about Coracle. He later told me that being able to switch easily between Damus and Coracle is what originally hooked him! Interoperability FTW.
What's Next
It's now mid-April, 2023 and I'm finishing up a fellowship at FUTO — they gave me a generous grant of $20k to spend three months working on Coracle full time, and I've tried not to disappoint. But my time is drawing to an end, and I'm wondering what to do next — find funding and start my own company? Go back to my old job? Something in between? I've got a few irons in the fire, so we'll see which one hatches first.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't give God the glory for this journey. All along the way I have been pushed out of my comfort zone, and over and over God has "worked all things out for good to those who... are called according to his purpose" just in time, and in unexpected ways. Coracle is God's project, and I pray every day that he would "establish the work of our hands for us, yes, establish the work of our hands."
So here's to the next 10 years of Nostr (that's 6 months in real-world years)! 🥂
