Malleable Systems Collective digest — 2025
The Malleable Systems Collective discusses and experiments with extensibility for user empowerment.
2025 is drawing to a close. It's time for our annual digest of collective activities over the past year!
Discourse
Our Discourse-based forum continues to be our most active communication medium. If you're not already on the forum, please do check it out.
Here are some of the topics we discussed:
- Paper
- NeXT, OOP, WWW, HTML
- Ink & Switch malleable software essay
- History as a First-class Citizen
- On UI as Code
- erishell: replacing command-line flags and configuration with a DSL
- The Idea Processor, or "What is the use case?"
- From the Web to a Metaverse OS (with no apps!)
- The Data-First movement
- Locality, modular analysis
- Lithification
- Syntropize: An Operating Environment for Malleable Software
- The Web That Never Was
- distributed as in Git - replication of "live" objects
- Substrates 2025
- Transparent (=inspectable) UIs
- Tote: Multiset Rewriting Language
- The Syndicated Actor Model
- A minimalist hypertext browser
- Binary Biology and Gameboy OS in Bash assembler
- Lopecode: Self-editing, humanely embeddable Observable notebooks
- Brutalist HTML quine
Matrix
Our Matrix room was fairly quiet this year. I recommend joining the forum if you haven't already.
Looking ahead
Are there malleable-focused projects you wish you could pursue, if only there were some funding available to support your work? We may work towards some form of grant funding program in the future. Let us know in the grant funding forum thread if this would be of interest to you.
— J. Ryan Stinnett