Comment by pfraze

Ey, I made Fritter. The “fr” shamelessly came from my last name. Actually the cooler thing was Rotonde, which Devine of 100 rabbits fame made. Beaker has the ability to duplicate somebody else’s website, which we called forking. So Devine made a social website where the whole application was the website software itself.

Bear in mind that beaker sites are like mutable torrents. They’re just collections of files. The fun is that you can read and write those files by an API. The js in Rotonde would detect if you owned the site, and then present a text input which would write a new text file in the posts folder. The site would then use js to read all its own post texts and the post texts of followed users to produce a feed. To create a new “account” you would fork an existing site, copying all the application software. This meant the software itself was literally viral. It was really cool.

If you think a bit about it, you can probably guess the problems we ran into (both with rotonde and fritter). Most of it had to do with scaling - as all this occurred in the frontend of these p2p sites - and multi device coordination. There was, however, a pretty intense zen simplicity in the pattern of websites that wrote their own files with JS, and I wouldn’t write the idea off entirely.