People keep sending us the article about OpenAI banning "goblins". Spritely does not use generative AI in any of its work. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny that Spritely Goblins, our distributed programming environment, is too cool and easy to obsess over, too powerful. We will not apologize for this

Spritely office hours today! Come hang out, hear what's happening, and talk about what you're working on or interested in! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic...

We’re excited to announce Spritely Goblins 0.18.0! Featuring new caching layer called “sleepy actors”, OCapN protocol updates, and numerous bug fixes! Get cozy by the fire, get a nice cup of tea, and have a relaxing read about this exciting new Goblins release! spritely.institute/news/spritel...

Spritely crew members @dustyweb.bsky.social and @flockofbirbs.bsky.social will be speaking at QCon London 2026 about "Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet" on March 18th! qconlondon.com/presentation...

Spritely Hoot, our Scheme->WASM compiler (and all-around WASM toolkit) hits 0.8.0, and this one is a BIG release! spritely.institute/news/hoot-0-... For the first time you can LIVE develop web applications using Hoot, from the comfort of your own editor! See the video at the top!

Impeccable curation: Right after I talked about 4 ways to ♥️/👿 browsers, @flockofbirbs.bsky.social @spritelyinst.bsky.social is up next saying break up the browser monoliths, browsers should just be a shell for WASM.

Couldn't make it to #FOSDEM? Here's a list of talks by #spritely folks, including me, plus a list of talks I just recommend! social.coop/@cwebber/116...

If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritelyinst.bsky.social We have the skills and underlying tech, but we need resources to fund it. Feel free to reach out.

Coming to #FOSDEM? Come see the #Spritely crew speak! We've got a whole bunch of exciting talks lined up this year! community.spritely.institute/t/spritely-f...

Mandy: ActivityPub on Spritely Goblins! spritely.institute/news/mandy-a... Jessica Tallon, co-author of ActivityPub and Spritely engineer, discusses a proof of concept ActivityPub application combining the actor model properties of Spritely Goblins and ActivityPub alike!

I've said a lot, there's more that can be said, but instead I'll switch to the ask. Does the above resonate with you? @spritelyinst.bsky.social could really, truly use your help. Consider donating. I promise we'll put it to good use. spritely.institute/donate/ Let's build a better internet! 💜

But what does it mean for systems to be social? Here's something you can't do on either ActivityPub or ATProto, but is a demo we built with Goblins and OCapN: a collaborative farming game! spritely.institute/news/goblinv...

And we're still building key infrastructure. Goblins recently got a major upgrade to its persistence system: spritely.institute/news/spritel... And it's about to get another one. Not really yet announced, but we're working on a hot-cache system that loads actors from store on demand. It's neat!

We also recently put out a blogpost and demo of a chat system that *nobody* centrally hosts called "Brassica Chat" spritely.institute/news/composi... You can try on it on the page. It's a demo, but it's a step towards secure communication for a hostile world.

We're big believers in having tangible examples of tech so people can understand and it's not just vaporware. Sometimes that's challenging to do with low-level tech in development. But games are a great way to show things off! Unusually, Spritely has a whole arcade page! spritely.institute/arcade/

We're building cool tech: - Goblins, p2p distributed programming: spritely.institute/goblins/ - Hoot, a WebAssembly toolkit (and Scheme->WASM compiler) spritely.institute/hoot/ - OCapN, a secure distributed p2p networked protocol ocapn.org But... what are we *doing* with these things?

User-empowering technology is a lot of work, corporations aren't motivated to build it. We need research and development of new tech that changes the game from an org that isn't bound by pushing profit. And that's why @spritelyinst.bsky.social is a nonprofit research lab. So... what are we doing?

I love computers. When people say "Computers were a mistake!" it makes me sad. But it's had to blame people. The direction computers have gone in, the experience people largely have had, is a loss of agency and empowerment. How do we bring that back, and do better than ever even?

What can we do? Is there hope? Is it possible to build something better? Spritely was born out of this work, and the strive to create infrastructure allowing for "Networks of Consent". More on that here: spui25.nl/programma/we...

*None* of the decentralized social networks today are robust enough to handle threats facing vulnerable people and activists today. Not the fediverse, not Bluesky/ATProto. What to do? (Here's a talk on that: "Protocols and Purpose in a Global Democratic Crisis" c-tube.c-base.org/w/f9pF5pwxX8... )

@spritelyinst.bsky.social is developing some damn cool tech: Distributed programming! Leading the way on a secure P2P protocol (OCapN)! A WebAssembly toolkit! But: is "cool tech" what matters? *Why* are we trying to make cool tech? What are the *social implications* of making this technology?

For this #GivingTuesday I'm going to make the (biased) argument for why you might consider donating to @spritelyinst.bsky.social, especially if you care about a healthier future for the internet! spritely.institute/donate/ Here's a little thread explaining more... 🧵

Local-first chat using CRDTs meets object capability security using @spritelyinst.bsky.social's tech!

Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types spritely.institute/news/composi... Capability security AND local-first chat?! Two great tastes that taste great together! Plus try our tasty demo, live on the blogpost: Brassica Chat!

If you're in Amsterdam next week, our Executive Director @dustyweb.bsky.social is giving a keynote: "We Can Change the Defaults: Building Networks of Consent and Spaces of Joy in the Ruins of Social Media" spui25.nl/programma/we...

Instead of doing the game jam this time around, we've been making some interesting new demos! And here's GoblinShare: Secure, Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing with Goblins spritely.institute/news/goblins... Combining Goblins, OCapN, and encrypted content addressed storage!

Next Spritely office hours! Today! At 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Cya there!

Next Spritely office hours! Today! At 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Cya there!

New System Crafters today focused on Hoot! www.youtube.com/live/0jvN_qW...

I am SO EXCITED to announce the new release of @spritelyinst.bsky.social Goblins 0.17.0 featuring MAJOR new improvements to our persistence system, including a lightning-fast storage backend called Bloblin! spritely.institute/news/spritel...

Hoot fans! Lisp fans! Rejoyce! Scheme in the browser just got even nicer and cozier to use with Hoot 0.7.0! spritely.institute/news/hoot-0-...

Hoot, our Scheme to WASM compiler, version 0.7.0 is out! spritely.institute/news/hoot-0-... A whole bunch of quality of life improvements! Importing Guile modules is easier, more common scheme library (SRFI) support, and much more! Get it while it's hot, and enjoy this cozy release!

Spritely Goblins v0.17.0: Persistence is better than ever! spritely.institute/news/spritel... Our distributed programming system Goblins has a brand new persistence system named Bloblin which is LIGHTNING fast! Your programs smoothly serialize and BAM, reawaken! Let's go!

It is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to contain the amount of excitement in making this post... We have Shepherd running on Spritely Goblins running ON TOP OF GUIX! See the screenshot! This is HUGE! We just wrote about Goblins + Shepherd a few days ago but progress is SO FAST! spritely.institute/news/shepher...

Double good news about Spritely's Hoot, Our Scheme->WASM compiler! WASM 3.0 released, and Hoot gets a mention! webassembly.org/news/2025-09... AND! iOS updated Safari to support the WASM features we use. Which means you can now play Cirkoban anywhere! files.spritely.institute/embeds/cirko...

Shepherd × Goblins update! spritely.institute/news/shepher... Some of you may know that we've been working on porting Shepherd (Guix's init/daemon manager service) to Spritely Goblins. We're getting close! Things run! We even show off a Goblins + Shepherd powered fleet orchestration in the post!

🎙 New Episode of Igalia Chats: Yeah, but for what? Wingo on Wasm @meyerweb.com and @bkardell.com chat with @wingolog.org about Web Assembly www.igalia.com/chats/wingo-...

Spritely Goblins v0.16.1 has been released! spritely.institute/news/spritel... This patch release includes several fixes! Most especially, OCapN + Goblins programs stopped compiling to Webassembly with Hoot (oops, it's fixed now!)

Spritely office hours! At 4pm ET! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Learn what #spritely folks are up to! Talk about your own projects! Hang out with us!

We’re going to be holding our next office hours on Wednesday the 27th of August 2025 2 PM EDT (6 PM UTC)! community.spritely.institute/t/next-offic... Tell us what you're hacking on with Spritely tools, tell us how it's going, ask us questions! Hope to see you!

Announcing Spritely Goblins v0.16.0! With MAJOR speedups and a brand new Unix Domain Socket netlayer! spritely.institute/news/spritel... These speedups are HUGE! 10-20x speedups for core operations! And now you can use Goblins + OCapN with Unix Domain Sockets for local inter-process communication!

Spritely presented spirited speeches spanning the planet! spritely.institute/news/spritel... If you've missed out on some of the many speeches we've given this year, here's a nice summary! Enjoy!

Datalog in miniKanren deosjr.github.io/dynamicland/... And it's using @spritelyinst.bsky.social's Hoot to compile to Webassembly! It's so cool when things like this appear in the wild and you don't even know someone was working on it!

Goblinville: A Spring Lisp Game Jam 2025 retrospective spritely.institute/news/goblinv... This spring for the Lisp Game Jam we wanted to show off something realtime using @spritelyinst.bsky.social's tools and protocol, so we built a browser-based walk-around-chat-and-plant-things game!

Goblinville: A Spring Lisp Game Jam 2025 retrospective spritely.institute/news/goblinv... We made a cute lil' multiplayer walk-around-and-plant-things demo for the last lisp game jam using Goblins, Hoot, and OCapN!

Functional hash tables explained spritely.institute/news/functio... In this new blogpost, @flockofbirbs.bsky.social talks about the theory behind HAMT based immutable hashtables, and how Goblins on Guile uses them for our new immutable hashtable representation!

Not only do we have the exciting news about Oaken today, but also there's a new patch release out: Hoot v0.6.1! spritely.institute/news/hoot-0-... New, easier deployment of Hoot programs with --bundle! A load of fixes! Lots of things! (And just in time for the Lisp Game Jam, next week!)

Announcing Spritely Oaken: a project to build a secure language execution environment for Guile Scheme! Funded by NLNet and NGI Zero! spritely.institute/news/announc... Blogpost by Oaken's lead author, @daphne.preston-kendal.eu!

Successful supporter drive supplements Spritely's story spritely.institute/news/2024-20... Over $90k raised! Over 500 individual donors! Our fundraiser was a success, and so we talk about it! We've been working on pushing out the rewards, we include lovely quotes from donors, etc! THANK YOU!!!!!!

Spritely Goblins v0.15.1 is released! spritely.institute/news/spritel... Lots of little bugs fixed, including many from the community! It's been great to see so many people trying out Goblins, keep it up! 💜