Mastodawn

Ink and Switch wrote a nice blogpost recently talking about "Malleable Software" https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/

It resonated with me a lot. The idea of building software that has an on-ramp that keeps on-ramping, guiding a user to not only become an expert, but to make the software their own, really resonated with me.

It's felt for a long time that Gnome has gone in the opposite direction. Trying to make something easy and clean, but end users aren't part of that journey.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Jun 11

I don't just want to focus on the negative: if not Gnome, what *should* we use? Well, I'm not sure anything else is currently ideal. Maybe it's time for something else.

I particularly like the bit about the above essay that talks about how Hypercard helped its users grow to become experts. Topical, and thoughtful.

This is the kind of direction I want to see from software, one where users are part of the story: software that grows with users, users that grow with software.

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Space Hobo

@cwebber It's interesting that even nerd-bait software systems like `sway` ended up deciding on CSS for styling configuration. It reminds us that part of the fun of early HTML was that you'd just open up pico or notepad and go to town. Room for more of that sort of thing!