I don't know that there's much value to, for example, creating another web based YouTube front-end when Invidious exists
I guess I just look at the way tech is now and feel disappointed. Its very addictive, "social" yet lonely. I don't find the alternative networks like Reddit, Mastodon, etc much better. I have held off doing anything, cut back most of my social usage but still found problems and years ago, yes I tried to make this idea work and shut it down. But I've felt like I really needed a solution, and so I use this everyday as an alternative to other forms of media consumption. And the hope is longer term it continues to develop as a useful utility. I'll keep investing time in, slowly iterating, figuring out what works and what doesn't. I'm not looking to gamify it or seeking fame or notoriety. Tbh, if it stays small great, if I can figure out how to make "conversational networks" [1] work even better. Anyway, happy to answer questions.
IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services like email, posts, tasks, chat, IM etc. but implemented in a way that all data would be portable to other services (open standards) and its storage would be "bottomless", meaning that users wouldn't have to worry about storage limitation for photos/videos for instance, as they would be sharing resources with other nodes worldwide. There would have to be some monetary incentive(s), of course, but they would be secondary to the bigger cause of keeping a true cyber interconnected community outside big tech.
Edit: I should say there's a configuration json in home/cards.json but I haven't documented the various settings for cards, RSS feeds, YouTube channels yet.
Uses Go, a language written by and maintained by Google [1]. Uses co-pilot written by GitHub for development [4].
Mu is £11 a month and you cannot see any screenshot of what you are getting [2], the same price you could buy a cheap VPS for [3]. The two authors of the project are asim and co-pilot. The commits have meaningless messages [4].
I would run a million miles away from this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)
[2] https://github.com/asim/mu
To address some of your other comments on commits/copilot. Commit messages are about as meaningful as email subject titles. At a certain point they really don't offer much value when you have powerful search tools. Essentially the source of truth is the current codebase. Maybe the commit message is going to provide insight into what was happening at that time, but when you're coding with AI toolings it feels almost irrelevant if not dated. If anything it should autocommit with a useful message if its that much of an issue. Second to that, Yes I use copilot, why, because hand coding is 10x slower. I lay the foundations by hand but then started to rely on copilot for a lot of changes beyond that. Again going back to the point, yes big tech failed us, but on social and consumer. The dev tooling and technology is fine, but the addictive and exploitive nature of the consumer tooling is not.
In all honesty, thank you for highlighting the depths of the warts on the project. It's always good for people to see the truth.
Note on £11/month. It's free to use. Membership is just for those who want to support it and help with roadmap, get access to features, etc but point taken about the screenshot.
The membership is unclear also: it says "try for free" which makes me suspect I will only be able to use it for limited time before needing to pay, but you only need to pay to support the project and early access. Seems like a lot of potential users will be lost because they get the impression it's a subscription service.
uka•2mo ago
modelorona•2mo ago
asim•2mo ago
kennywinker•2mo ago
Your criticism of using github and discord are somewhat valid, but asking people to re-invent the wheel while they re-invent the bicycle seems like arbitrarily making up rules so everyone fails. Is there some influence you expect to leak into their platform thru github or discord?
habbekrats•2mo ago
you dont want anything to do with google or anything they make or host. they will only do it to extract shit from you. they dont give nything dont be naive.
treyd•2mo ago
Maybe not their ad agenda, but certainly one of their agendas. Specifically, the agenda they have to get young, inexperienced developers prepared for specifically the software development practices they employ internally.
It was directly stated that "Go is not for clever developers" and that their target is recent graduates with limited experience. It punishes you for trying to think about what you're building and to design sophisticated software, relying more on brute force. It doesn't encourage you to reach higher.
hn_throw2025•2mo ago
If you’re working on a greenfield project in a team of one then I suppose it’s great to get in an expressive mood and emit your code poetry from those fingertips.
It’s very different to inherit a quirky puzzle and reverse engineer a mental model from there.
kennywinker•2mo ago
What “clever” code is required to write a BBS-over-IP? 99.99% of code isn’t clever and shouldn’t be clever.
> It punishes you for trying to think about what you're building and to design sophisticated software, relying more on brute force.
Can you give an example of this? I have not written much go, so i am unable to think of a case where golang encourages brute force over sophistication?
treyd•2mo ago
They've explicitly stated that they wanted to discourage building abstractions, since "abstractions are hard to learn".
Concretely, this is evident in how channels and goroutines both poorly compose together, in part a result of the unsophisticated type system. It's difficult to build very generic libraries that can be leveraged as force multipliers, like the tokio-tower ecosystem does. You can do it, but it comes at performance costs or involves relying on codegen.
Google's Bazel build systems are designed around reasoning about and checking-in generated code, but the standard go tooling doesn't do this well and git workflows also don't really grapple with it well. This aspect of the design is very clearly an example of internal Google processes leaking out.
threethirtytwo•2mo ago
And all of that culminates with: Could the level of technology and the internet reach the state it is today without big tech? And if not, was the price we paid to get here worth it?
DoctorOW•2mo ago
No, it doesn't.
Obviously Mu could exist without Go, if Google stopped development on the language, its current state could be forked (Go 2). Lots of programming languages exist without Google's support, there are even programming languages older than Google.
threethirtytwo•2mo ago
uka•2mo ago
myaccountonhn•2mo ago
Otherwise it looked very interesting, I like the idea of a flat-fee structure without subscriptions.