Hello world! My name is Mike and my blood pressure is 114/88 mmHg.
I am building a free speech platform. It will start off as a forum to replace Nabble and Discord. Woven together is a powerful Reddit-like search function with a Discord-like architecture.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to email me at 88mmhg@proton.me
We are a small team of reactionary programmers. By "reactionary," we mean programmers who prefer mature, understandable tools over rapidly changing ecosystems.
Textile is a free speech platform currently in development. It weaves forums and chat together into a single platform.
A textile is made from many threads woven into a durable fabric. We see communities the same way. People are the threads; relationships are the weave. Textile is designed to help families, friends, work connections, and communities stay connected even when distance, time, or circumstance would otherwise pull them apart.
We long for tightly knit-woven communities and decided to build the infrastructure to support them. Put simply, it is difficult for people to stay connected without software that provides forums or chat. Since many people become separated from their family, friends, or community, a dependable speech platform can bring lasting value.
Textile is designed to keep your contacts and communities tightly knit-woven. Our values make this possible. We value simplicity, reliability, and usability. The beauty of these values is that they internally feed each other. For example, simplicity makes code easy to maintain and therefore communities stay reliably held together.
By simplicity, we mean conceptual minimalism. This does not mean limiting the number of features; that would be ideological minimalism, which we reject. Instead, simplicity means using the fewest concepts necessary to provide each feature. Fewer concepts make software easier to understand, easier to maintain, and ultimately more reliable.
From reliability, we derive a conviction for free speech to the extent that is legal in our jurisdiction; the suppression of such speech would be inherently condemned to undermine reliability. A communication platform is only reliable if users can reasonably expect lawful speech to remain lawful tomorrow. Textile therefore supports free speech to the extent permitted by our jurisdiction. We also minimize spam, automated abuse, and obscenities (especially CSAM).
Usability guides the overall structure of Textile. Our conviction for usability expounded to a vision we had. Namely, to interweave a powerful Reddit-like search function with an intuitive Discord-like forum architecture. Rather than treating forums and chat as separate experiences, Textile is designed to weave them together into a single platform. That way, everybody can find and participate in circles and communities they belong in.
For layout, we use HTML and CSS. For interactivity, we use JavaScript. For the backend, we use Luan (not to be confused with Lua). For database storage and management, we use Lucene. We use Mercurial and repositoryhosting.com for repository hosting.
These technologies were chosen for their maturity, simplicity, and long-term maintainability rather than their popularity.