Right - one nice thing about taking sabbatical is I can talk about what I'm doing, without NDAs in the way. So there will be occasional #Querki musings here, tagged as such.
Context, for those who don't know me well: https://querki.net/ is my own eensy garage startup, that I've been running for many years. It's essentially a hybrid wiki/database, aimed at individuals and small communities.
More info on the high concept at https://querki.net/help/#!What-is-Querki
1/
It's never made a cent (I'm too perfectionist for my own good, so it's still beta), and is showing its age -- it's been running for 12 years now, and the UI just feels a little clunky and old-fashioned. It's still *useful*, but could be so much better.
I've largely neglected it in recent years, since I've had to focus on dayjob, but I'm planning to spend the next few months primarily working on it.
2/
But #Querki is looking weirdly timely now, in a counter-culture way. It's anti-advertising, own-your-own-data, and while it's not *anti*-AI per se, it doesn't have any and might well never do so. (If we ever do add any AI, it’ll be strictly opt-in, not this "we use all your data for training without your consent” BS.)
It's intentionally anti-enshittification - I considered VC money early on, and ran screaming once I understood the implications.
thread/
This is, BTW, not a call for everyone to pile into #Querki right now. As part of the upcoming work, I'm going to be downscaling it to a single node for a while, both to simplify things and make it a little cheaper to run.
Folks are welcome to join if it looks immediately useful to you, but I’ll give a yell when I think it's in a better place and I'm actively looking for more users, hopefully by March.
(thread continues…)
Anyway, step one complete: #Querki is finally running in #Docker locally.
One mistake was that I committed to an early deployment solution a dozen years ago which, sadly, was a dead-end. That was kind of invasive, and wound up pinning Querki to *ancient* versions of #Scala and #Akka (and libraries).
So now, we're switching everything to Docker, and probably just going to use native AWS for deployment for the time being. I may eventually switch to #k8s, but one problem at a time…
Justin du Coeur