THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL. DO NOT EXPECT ANYTHING TO WORK, OR EVEN MAKE SENSE.

The thesis is that we need a system that:

• Is a user agent but can do more than a browser, notably be connected persistently and carry out smarter automation.
• Supports polylegal governance, which is to say that it can create governed systems that are shared with others, declare various rules that it abides by in given contexts, and enforce where needed. (The polylaw concept is taken from the work of Ada Palmer but existed in earlier times.)
• Is LoFi (local first) and can sync itself to various places (e.g. be partly on your phone, have different identities in different places, all kinds of confidentiality levels).
• Supports "big world" integrations (e.g. having the content you publish indexed globally so that others can easily find it) but only under the control of those who contribute content.
• Might go so far as to eliminate the notion of server, replacing it with pods communicating with each other.

I am playing with primitives from:

• ATProtocol
• IPFS and Iroh
• Minecraft server governance
• WNFS
• CRDTs
• UCANs

and other stuff that's too new for anyone to know how it'll play out.

• npm install (or whichever one you love the most) as per usual
• Run ./patch-pds-install.js. Note that (because of how the ATProto code is set up and because the JS dev environment is a hellish landscape) what this does is that it goes inside node_modules and patches dependencies.
• It expects Pg server running localhost with databases called polypod and polypod-test.
• All the PDS passwords are hunter2 — if you run this in production somehow, you know what's coming