So, this term of “App Free Computing” relates to stuff I posted about in Feb. 2021 in the topic From silo-first to task-oriented federated app design.
It is the idea of having finer-grained building blocks that form the social experience people have on the Fediverse. I also mentioned the term, together with SX in:
Apps are very artificial, non-inclusive abstractions that reflect the opinionated feature set its creators find important enough to add into the software.
Since writing “Reimagine Social” I am making a more deliberate effort to picture what “social” actually means. Like if you mention “social network” to any person, they immediately think of technology. Which is weird, as we do social networking since the dawn of time. And even worse is “Social Media” that has restricted our entire thinking about online social interaction to features that Big Tech platforms invented many years ago. We copy/paste these to the Fediverse and slam the label “Feature X… but decentralized” on it, and are satisfied. That is not reimagining of social, and the average non-technical person doesn’t care much about that.
Take the ActivityStreams standard. What does that name speak to us? Well, a “stream of activities”. That is very broad and universal as a concept, and something to work with. It comes close to a real-life concept. Our daily lives consist of performing all kinds of activities.
Now bring “Apps” into this picture, and hear e.g. Mastodon saying “We are only interested in a stream of Notes”. You may respond with “But can you also display my stream of Recipes that people exchange with each other?”. The answer may be “No, we are a microblogging app, duh!” or it may be “If there’s popular demand, we may consider it.” The app silo at work 