darksoil gathering
harvest from local experimentation
darksoil was born out of years of conversations about our yearnings to live our lives in thriving places. To that end, we orient around building physical and social soil to support the intermingling of life.
Naturally, we wanted to build an app for people to come together and do things.
As you will see in a lot of the writing we do, a lot of the anchoring for the experiments we run is based on needs in the village of Röstånga where I (Viktor) live.
For many years we have been formulating and ideating around the needs that are visible to me in our village. Event needs are a big one. How do we know what is happening? Where can we invite people to our gatherings? People want to do things, many things that don’t seem to happen; can we help make them happen?
There was a period when facebook actually enabled a lot of this. Most people (at least born in the 70s and later) were on facebook and posting something on it meant that “everyone knew about it”. That’s no longer the case and even for all of the people that still have some activity on that platform, there is a certain element of cacophony and attention steal that makes it far from ideal for organising.
We wanted to find out what it would be like if our village had an app that you could install on your phone, where we could invite each other to gatherings and see what is going on.
So we started making gather. gather is an app that lets you create events, see what happenings are upcoming, and RSVP.
In both village and internal conversations along the way, we came to realise that there is another element that we wanted to include beyond the meetup functions of apps like facebook, meetup, and eventbrite. We wanted a more co-creative, responsibility-sharing, and fun way to actually make happenings come to be.
In order to do this, we are making it possible to not just post events you’re offering, but to also publish ideas of an event that could happen and invite others to join and contribute to make them real. We will go into a little more detail of how the app works, but first a side note...
Playing with generality
Since we were building an app for people to see what things are going on around them, it became clear to us that this app wouldn’t have legs unless it was supported on mobile.
We were also very clear that we wanted to create an app that did not require us to be sysadmins and maintainers of some platform for the village and become a central player holding all the village data. For these reasons we wanted to keep building on Holochain, but at the time, we had no way of deploying Holochain on mobile. Since we’re committed to developing our apps in direct relationship with the people we’re making them with and for, we needed Holochain to work on mobile. So, we set out exploring ways to make Holochain work on mobile.
Many months were spent experimenting with what the boundaries and hurdles were. We went through many options for bridging with other technologies to get the job done. We even simulated the Holochain data storage model on Firebase so we could test our prototype in the village.
In February 2024 the darksoil team gathered in Röstånga for an extended retreat with a purpose of testing our app with real people, on the ground, in context. And we did. The local test meetups had people installing gather on their phones, seeing, engaging and posting events. This was not a clean and smooth experience by any means and we cut some corners getting there on time. Bugs were found and usability was poor but we validated the pathway.
We learned that people wanted it. That there was a need and leaders and members of different community groups in the village were happy to work with a clunky, funky app and could see the potential in it for themselves, their groups, and the village as a whole. They gave us great feedback which got turned around directly to improve the app at all the levels of the stack. This is why we do applied research. It’s less efficient, and more costly in the short term, but it makes all the difference in the long run. Plus, it just feels better.
We also surfaced a lot of learning about what it means to deliver mobile app experiences. For instance we learned what the difference is between in-app notifications and push-notifications on iOS and Android. We learned how to think about interplay between desktop and mobile nodes of a Holochain application. We learned that people are very excited about being able to use something like this on their phones.
After spending something like a year with this first experiment around gather, we are confident that the tooling that we created in order to do this for ourselves will be useful for others. This feels really good to us, because it also validates that our way of working is working.
Solve the local need, and the patterns and tools developed along the way can be shared forth to other projects meeting people’s needs. Attempts at nested commoning.
In this case, the local need for mobile functionality became the p2p Shipyard which we are super excited to make available to the world. Read exactly how that is happening here.
We believe that this “local context first” app development focus will also keep yielding more harvests like this. In fact, our current development focus, plenty, is already making us modularize software that are meeting needs we and others have around things like email integration and multi-device agents.
gather - the app
gather is pretty simple. Install the app, see what is happening, create an event or propose an event that you would like to see happen. In your proposals you can set both location and date to be decided later if you want. You can also include things that you need in order to make this proposal a thing that happens in reality. This could be instruments for a music jam, games for a board game evening or just a minimum of 8 people for a game of football.
Every event or event proposal has its page and people can interact with it by RSVPing or fulfilling some request. Hosts need to be able to update and cancel events with guests being notified, and this need is driving the creation of a notifications module which will benefit the whole Tauri ecosystem.
So what is the status of gather now, in the spring of 2024?
After playing with it in the village we have documented a bunch of user feedback on how we can improve the app. These improvements are being made at both the UI and backend levels. We also realised that there were some issues on other technical layers that needed to be resolved for gather to be published on iOS (great progress have been made on them and there is just a need for re-integration left).
With all of this we decided that we would shift our developmental focus onto plenty which is more geared towards desktop (even though there are strong use-cases for mobile there too). Once we can smoothly build for both Android and iOS, and our first version of plenty is out. We plan to return to gather to offer it again to our village (and, of course, other communities that think it fits for them too).
If you want to play with gather as it was at the time for our tests, you can download it and run it on any desktop right now at darksoil.studio/gather.
We really look forward to continuing playing with this little app to keep building the social soil that we want to live in. n the meantime, let us know if you want to gather.