Beaker came to my mind immediately as well when reading this article :) It sounds so much like the perfect fit for the author.

The new beta has been quite depressing for me, as all my personal apps stopped working due to their complete rewrite of their API. I don't know if I'll ever be willing to start it all over again.

But for anyone who hasn't already played with it, I totally recommend it. It feels like the web we should have had.

Really sorry about breaking your old apps. If you ping me on twitter (@pfrazee) or IRC, I can spend some time helping you convert them over. Most of the same capabilities are there (or on the way) so we'll hopefully just need to update the code.

EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p protocol and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly with performance and reliability. It sucked to break existing content though.

> EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p protocol and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly with performance and reliability. It sucked to break existing content though.

What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the future? I really like the project and realize it’s still young and can probably risk piling on breaking changes, but I can’t imagine future upgrade paths will involve contacting one of the project maintainers on Twitter.

> What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the future?

I will say that I'm personally embarrassed that we had to do it. I don't like disappointing people who support our work. There was a post on HN recently about how Unity keeps breaking its platform; I don't want to end up like that.

The other thing I'll say is, there was a year-long gap from the 0.8.x beaker releases to the 1.0, and a lot of that time was connected to the engineering work on the protocol. The top priority was scaling, but we also added tooling the protocol so that if a similar breaking change is needed in the future, we can handle it smoothly.

That's ok, you're doing an awesome job, keep focusing on the good work :) It'll probably itch me again at some point.

I had to rewrite an app as well - but it turned out to be incredibly simple.

Here's my first commit: https://github.com/kickscondor/duxtape/commit/55dbde9519aedb.... Can't really call it a rewrite - more of a search-and-replace. (Though I had a bit of code that used the old peer sockets - and that code works differently now.)

Beaker looks very interesting indeed! Download it as I write this. Reminds me a little of what I've read about HyperCard. Looking forward to testing it.

Thanks for the heads-up! There are so many links to follow up on here in this thread.

Is it really a technical problem, though?

If the majority of people _want_ to fight and is more willing to act in bad faith to hurt the opponent / win the argument rather than willing to correct their opinion by discovering facts, I don't think any technical solution could, nor should, try to correct that ("nor should", because it could quickly turn into some sort of oppression).

That being said, I commend you for looking for such solution, if only because masses' mood swings faster than technical solutions are implemented, and your features will be there when people are fed up with constant conflicts.

I think it is to some extent. The "Tyranny of the Majority" on internet forums pushes people to finding safe spaces for them. It's great that you can find subreddits for your interest and I even think they should exist for political ideologies, but I think it would do us a big service to see the main political arena to be more like the US House of Representatives.

For me, I see the main problem is that we need to create demand for fair and balanced news sources. I really don't like when you only hear about perceptions of other perspectives from pundits/activists, instead of hearing the opinion from its source. I think this is breeding prejudice. I think there is a vast amount of misrepresentation and the backlash we see is from people who often don't feel like they have the proper avenues to express themselves.

I try to be part of the solution, by paying for subscriptions for Bloomberg and WSJ. Its a hard problem, that's for sure.

Sorry to hear that. It's indeed an unfair situation and nothing is wrong with you, it's the industry that has a problem.

Have you considered building your own company? That's quite a change of skills, but that's what I've seen most "older" developers do.