Progress Toward Neighbourhoods’ Purpose
Previously, we have said that anyone can use the Neighbourhoods ‘Social Sensemaker’ with any Holochain apps. But, the greatest benefits from the Sensemaker result from making apps that are the most compatible with the Sensemaker. We call these ‘level 3 applets’. Level 3 applets will enable a high degree of customization by non-technical community creators and members. We are most excited about these applets because they best represent our commitment to mass participation in determining how online social spaces operate.
We believe that people who anchor and run communities should articulate and shape its technology, because, ultimately these folks hold the best understand of what really suits the culture of a group. Developers can then focus on their key objective: delivering efficient code.
So, how do these work? Through modular and flexible UIs, applet developers will be able to make slots in the applets for community activators to choose what dimensions are rendered in the slot using a 'dimension widget' library that we provide.
When applet developers build/enable level 3 applets, community creators can choose different layouts, contexts, and types of reactions from component libraries. All of this will be made available in a ‘drag and drop’ style upon setting up a neighbourhood using our setup wizard. Soon, we aim to showcase these level 3 applets.
The playlist-maker applet prototype above comes from our handy new design system. The ability to rapidly mock up applets is critical for thinking about the ‘slots’ that can be made available for customization — all before you commit to writing any code!
In this example, slots could correspond to different moods: members could add, and then mark, uploaded songs with one of three 'moods' (say…”chill”, “happy” or “party”). The Social Sensemaker would then add songs to playlists that correspond to these moods, showing songs that received the most marks higher in the playlist.
Sensemaker Store & Signal Handling Improvements
📢 Technical updates incoming: The sensemaker store recently had a facelift. A new sensemaker store will now provide applet developers familiar and expected behavior of a typical API and state management system that follows an MVC architecture. The controller effectively decouples the view (reactive UI components) from the model (DHT data). This enables applet developers to think less about sensemaker and holochain internals, and build their apps using the NH framework in a declarative way.
Improvements are also being made to the sensemaker-lite’s signal handling for ‘realtime’ front-end status updates upon the occurrence of specific events (e.g. the creation of a new entry).
Other Things We’re Excited About
Our team is still growing! We’re delighted to welcome aboard Nick Stebbens, a recent graduate of the Holochain dev school, who will be supporting our frontend development. We’re also welcoming back pospi, a distributed systems architectural visionary who seeded ideas for Neighbourhoods with us years ago.
Speaking of, we’re also hiring a marketing manager. See details here if you want to be a part of this very newsletter and more.
Finally, we’ll be attending this year’s DWeb (Distributed Web) Camp in Northern California. We can’t wait to reunite with other enthusiasts and allies in the Holochain ecosystem.