So, we will offically launch the public trial of Octothorpes tomorrow, but now I can tell you that it’s been public and actively used for the last month. In a way, it was more public in October than it is now, but we’ll get to that.
Nik and I had been planning a knowingly limited launch for Octothorpes for some time in October, using September as time to reflect on all the great conversations we had at XOXO. Plus, I was going to be in Japan for a good chunk of it on a long-delayed honeymoon. Martha and I were walking to the national gardens in Kyoto, when I noticed a bunch of messages to a thread Nik had started with me and a cool person named Jay Zuerndorfer in the XOXO slack. (The gardens were closed but the walk there was full of delights and memorable surprises and we were thrilled. Metaphor for having fun outside of walled gardens? Surely not.)
Jay was starting a project called Weird Web October. The idea was simple – make a new website for each day in October, according to a set of themes. October seems popular for themed website thingies 1 But this was new, and when Nik was like “what if you used Octothorpes to keep track of all the cool new websites people will make” Jay said they had wanted to reach out about just that but had run out of time. Nik answered a few questions for them, and just as I was about to type something like “I’ll help you get set up when I can but I’m in Japan right now” they wrote back and said “cool, I think I got it working.” And, bang, a new Octothorpe got posted by someone whose name does start with “N-i” – maybe the second or third time that had happened.
In the grand scheme of things, maybe not that big of a deal since we built this to be easy, but it still felt really cool to see someone get it so quickly. Well done, Jay!
So October 1 rolls around, and the WWO site goes up with instructions for Octothorping your weird websites, and o m g we started to get new sites coming in. First theme was Nature.
And they just started coming. One of the things we most wanted that drove us to make Octothorpes in the first place was a way to find new, interesting, handmade, independent or personal websites – without signing on to a platform. And here it was, just happening every day. I’m typing this in October, so it’s still happening.
I ♡🔥 ℓ ᵒ v 𝒆 🎃🎈 this. Thank you so much Jay, and thank you so much to everyone who’s participated in Weird Web October. That’s just a personal thanks – Nik and I had almost nothing to do with this – JZ and everyone else did all the work, we just said “sure use Octothorpes.” I’m just saying thanks because I’ve enjoyed it so much.
Ok, I guess the one thing I did was make a starter site with a handy feed for filtering all the themes, but that’s just an add-on to the artistry and humor and fun that’s been flowing into the one public Octothorpes Ring since October 1.
I haven’t even been able to keep up with every post to #weirdweboctober but I did compile a list of some of my favorites so far. Before I get to that, just a couple more things about Octothorpes.
So, a thing kept happening in my brain when I’d browse the WWO sites, and I wonder if anyone else had this experience. I’d look at the feed on my site or the main Ring, and think, oh this is cool, I should go to the place where this all lives. And then I’d realize, no, this is the closest we’ll get to that. These are independent websites, hosted on so many different services and domain names (even CodePen!). The octothorpe for weirdweboctober has far more sites than a hashtag anywhere else – mastodon, x, instagram, wherever. I was looking at the platform, and it’s a protocol. And, if I wanted it, I could put the whole thing on my own web page. It’s unplesent to realize that the feeling of “oh let’s go to the place the content I want is locked up” is second-nature for me. So I’m glad to be working on something that pushes back against that way of thinking about the internet.
And, lastly, it’s time to share the secret that we’ve kept to make WWO work – we turned off security for the month so any site could post. And it went Ok!
There’s no authentication or encryption in the protocol so far (or even planned) – it just processes links between public websites. But the idea is that you can start or join a Ring where you send your hashtags and links, and that Ring has to verify your domain before you can start doing that. It’s a simple step to let people create and moderate their own communities. But right now we only have One Ring. By the time Weird Web October rolls around again, I’m sure we’ll be able to set them up with their own Ring to manage as they see fit. Instead of saying “oh we’re not ready for this” we trusted in the community of people who would want to spend October making creative websites enough that we just quietly removed the verification step on the main site. Leaving it in place would have really put a drag on the spontenaiety that we’ve seen all month as people found so many creative ways to interpret the day’s theme and post them however and wherever they want. Oct 1 rolled around, and things were working nicely.
Then, a week in, someone posted about us to hackernews and lobste.rs, two very popular developer blogs, and we got twenty-seven t h o u s a n d hits for our not-yet-launched project in one day. (You might note me dancing around the no-security thing in that post). I was sure someone was going to figure out our network was totally open and ruin the playground of curiosity that was just taking root there. But then… nothing bad happened.
Partially that’s just down to luck, but also I think the fact that we haven’t built a platform that proritizes low-effort engagement left enough of a garden wall in place to at least fail-to-encourage some tomfoolery. Or maybe it was all luck. Either way, I’m chosing to be heartened by this small instance of a special and fragile moment not being destroyed by the Internet At Large.
Anyway, yeah, it’s back on now – go register here. That’s why we’re “officially launching” a month after we let anyone go ham on it. Seeing the sites people octothorped was really inspiring to keep working on the protocol, and leaving the doors unlocked without anyone ruining it was really encouraging to keep pursuing less-toxic ways of connecting online.
I’m still discovering wonders in the feed. This is a very incomplete list.