Mixed day today. I've been kind of low energy and feeling a little demoralized. In part it is because I am making Y Combinator applications and I have to write all of this stuff that just feels kind of stupid to write down. I am noticing that the applications are maybe written this way as a moat. YC is built for a fairly optimized founder type – people who are precise, clear, and focused on something "achievable".
That's not me. I like making stuff. I think I have a cool fucking idea here, but I really just don't care that much for trying to convince money people that I am making something cool, and something that'll make them more money. The act of convincing is hard to do for a thing that doesn't exist, and something that is a rapidly evolving concept that I myself often have a difficult time describing to friends and family.
Comind is a project of rapidly escalating ambition. It started out as a goofy little Obsidian clone intended to auto-link notes. It is now some kind of pseudo-social network, knowledge graph tool, and instant messenger with a cosmology of weird language model characters. Just fuckin weird. Hard to tell someone that I think it'll make any money.
Akhil Rao (friend of the comind) sent me this article about rewilding the internet. I really enjoyed it, and it struck a chord with me. We are so stuck in this very strange, precise world of tech where things that are weird or frivolous are not welcome in our digital ecosystem. I hate that. I think Comind has this vague potential to be something weird as shit, fun to use, and just very different than what we are used to on our increasingly sterilized digital world.
It's making me more receptive to the idea of bootstrapping Comind, because I know that I can make something great and it mostly feels distracting trying to convince people to pay me to work on it.
Anyway. I did a little more work on Welder.jl, the part of the backend that handles message relays for melds. A meld in comind is basically a group chat or forum with some extra bells and whistles. We can all post misc thoughts into the meld as you would in a chat, but there is a second layer to the meld where the server will recommend thoughts you can choose to add to the meld.
This requires some additional infrastructure. Real-time comms is hard – you need a websocket relay to be able to push information to clients when you want to, such as when one of the other clients sends a message. Welder.jl handles this by providing a relay.
Currently, Welder.jl sits on top of the main HTTP server and retrieves all the meld information (i.e. past thoughts, context, title, description, etc.). This evening, I made a little chat relay client in the terminal for testing purposes. I've got it echoing back and forth!
The next step is getting the relay to push new messages out to all the existing clients. It shouldn't be too hard, but it's next up!
Good evening, y'all.
– Cameron