Welcome to FISSION Fragments #4 - our regular newsletter of awesome links. Want to get them delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe! We also tend to tweet a lot of these links from our Twitter account @fissioncodes if you want to get them in real time.
This week digs into the mobile compute revolution, website hosting via IPFS + ENS, surprise handheld games (!), decentralised chat apps, and bundling efforts by Dropbox.
Ross Schulman directly rejects the accepted norm of internet behemoths abusing user data in exchange for "free services" in an inspiring article: A Revolution In Your Pocket. What if data and services never had to leave our phones?
There is the potential today to reclaim control of our digital lives from monopolist platforms and unnecessary rent-seeking. There is a world within reach where always-on, always-connected pocket computers become personal data stores. All your photos, documents, messages, and other data live with you, not on a faceless server belonging to a random corporation. The only machine learning done is done for you. Data only leaves your device because you want to send it somewhere.
The author is careful to balance this aspirational scenario with what are genuine challenges. It will take significant work to realise this vision, including rethinking the current internet hub-and-spoke model, increasing adoption of IPv6, opening up radio spectrums, and extensive user education. Though daunting, these are not insurmountable: the activists' best ally is a dogged preference for incremental progress over time.
Have you ever tried to host your own site through with ENS + IPFS? Timur pointed us to a List of ENS+IPFS websites that have done this successfully, including the blog at the link. Also check out this great series of tutorials detailing how to do it for yourself!
Almonit.club is hosted like a normal website. It is stored on a server, and the name almonit.club is registered with a regular name service (DNS). To access almonit.club, the browser first asks the DNS in which server it is stored, and then gets the website from that server. With almonit.eth website we took a bit different approach. Instead of a server, we use IPFS, and instead of DNS, we use ENS.
It's not often that new handheld gaming devices get announced. Playdate, the brain child of veteran software shop Panic's Play, incorporates a delightfully odd crank that games can use for play mechanics. The device will include seasons of games specifically for the device. Details are still sparse, but learn along with Fission in this twitter thread and this article excerpt.
Created with care, for people who love videogames,
Decentralized, offline-first, cmd-line chat app in < 100 lines of code
To quote offlinefirst.org, we live in a disconnected & battery powered world, but our technology and best practices are a leftover from the always connected & steadily powered past.
Meet the new Dropbox :: Are we beginning to see the divisions between cloud storage providers be relaxed? One step towards integrating local-first storage and software.
Create, access, and share cloud content like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides and Microsoft Office files within Dropbox. You can also choose to open Microsoft Office files in Office Online or the Google web editor.
