I'm Asim, an engineer and author of the open source project Micro (https://micro.dev). I've been on this forum in various forms since 2009. In that time I've seen a lot of shifts in the technology landscape, participated in a few and even tried to start a company myself (which ended up VC funded). In typical HN fashion, I drank the kool-aid and applied to YC around 8-10 times. I got so far as going to mountain view for an interview but never got in. I played right into the idea of starting a fast growing company and "changing the world" by solving my own problems in the developer ecosystem but somewhere along the way lost sight of the problem I was solving. I think it speaks to my own need to seek validation (in the wrong place) but also the general nature of the ecosystem that became all about the pursuit of more funding, growth, users, etc. It really feels like while there's 70-80% value created, the other 20-30% is doing us a lot of harm. Consumer software has become addictive, corporations are becoming huge profit seeking blackholes that mostly cater to their shareholders and we have yet to see any great alternative to the existing tools and services we're now beholden too.
A couple weeks ago I posted Micro Chat (https://micro.mu) on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135683. This was my first effort in trying to solve the problems mentioned above. But I don't think it's enough. I think what we're talking about is something much bigger. And it's not going to be solved by open source, federation or a single tool. I'm starting to think we need to build something bigger, an entirely new community led app platform.
So here's my idea. Mu (pronounced mew) is a proposal to build a new community app platform from the ground up. It would address all the problems we seem to mention here about ownership of services, addictive scrolling, profit seeking agendas and do it by empowering a community to crowdfund the creation of an alternative system that focuses on being a utility for the people. It would generally be open source, potentially self hostable, but the larger goal would be to empower a handful of people to host and run the service for everyone else, a built like how Let's Encrypt is run today.
I've thrown this idea around a lot, started many discussions here and even tried to push a few things out but never really gotten anywhere with it. I think part of it is to just, build the smallest piece and see where it goes, hence Micro Chat, but the other part is to gauge the sentiment in the room and see whether we can actually fund something much bigger totally aligned with the community. I'm a huge fan of Google services and the utility they offer, but the nature of technology has veered so far into addiction with scrolling feeds, streaming and social media that I feel there's a need to do something now.
If there's interest, please comment and provide feedback.
Cheers Asim