2022-11-20
Just in time for Robin Sloan to give up on Spring '83, earlier this month I finally got aroud to launching STS-6 (named for the first mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger in Spring 1983), my experimental Spring '83 server. It's been a busy year; I had other things to do. But you might have guessed that something like this had been under my belt when I open-sourced a keygenerator for the protocol the other day.
If you've not played with Spring '83, this post isn't going to make much sense to you. Sorry.
Screenshot showing STS-6 in the context of two different Spring '83 clients
My server is, as far as I can tell, very different from any others in a few key ways:
I'm sure that there are those who would see this as automating something that was beautiful because it was handcrafted; I don't know whether or not I agree, but had Spring '83 taken off in a bigger way, it would always only have been a matter of time before somebody tried my approach.
From a design perspective, I enjoyed optimising an SVG image of my header so it could meaningfully fit into the board. It's pretty, and it's tolerably lightweight.
If you want to see my server in action, patch this into your favourite Spring '83 client: https://s83.danq.dev/10c3ff2e8336307b0ac7673b34737b242b80e8aa63ce4ccba182469ea83e0623
Without Robin's active participation, I feel that Spring '83 is probably coming to a dead end. It's been a lot of fun to play with and I'd love to see what ideas the experience of it goes on to inspire next, but in its current form it's one of those things that's an interesting toy, but not something that'll make serious waves.
In his last lab essay Robin already identified many of the key issues with the system (too complicated, no interpersonal-mentions, the challenge of keys-as-identifiers, etc.) and while they're all solvable without breaking the underlying mechanisms (mentions might be handled by Webmention, perhaps, etc.), I understand the urge to take what was learned from this experiment and use it to help inform the decisions of the next one. Just as John Postel's Quote of the Day protocol doesn't see much use any more (although maybe if my finger server could support QotD?) but went on to inspire the direction of many subsequent "call-and-response" protocols, including HTTP, it's okay if Spring '83 disappears into obscurity, so long as we can learn what it did well and build upon that.
Meanwhile: if you're looking for a hot new "like the web but lighter" protocol, you should probably check out Gemini. (Incidentally, you can find me at gemini://danq.me, but that's something I'll write about another day...)
Robin's lab blog post looking back on Spring '83
STS-6: my Spring '83 server implementation
My note about open-sourcing a Spring '83 keygenerator
Spring '83 specification on Denylists
My Spring '83 board which lists my recent blog posts
