Hello everyone! My name is Daniel and my handle everywhere is dahacouk. I found the FoC whilst also finding the Local-First community and attending the meeting in Berlin this year. I think the main thing that drives me is the need to be in control of my environment, be that physical or digital. Not the easiest theme to pick for one's life's work, but hey! I don't code anymore, but I do long to build little useful collaborative apps without coding. It all started way back with a ZX81... Spectrum... Amiga... PC... Mac. I studied art in the late 80s. Ran an ISP in the mid 90s. Dreamed and talked of having interoperability and open protocols ubiquitous in every sector through the 00s, and started a nonprofit open source research project. Started building demonstrations in the early 10s with EU research funding. Arrived in the 20s with a team and the beginnings of an app to build mini apps: like if Excel could build apps and not just spreadsheets, and we could email them to each other. My projects are on my LinkedIn as I don't want to break the rules! 😉 So, now I'm immersed in: no-code, local-first and malleable-software isms. I've shared our work in #CCL5VVBAN What I'm most interested in is how end-users can build and alter simple apps. Rather than building a typical fine-grained programming environment, I'm wondering about what people do most when interacting with services and data in their daily lives: create and modify things, manage relationships between things. List, filter, analyse and select/group things. What minimal set of user-interface and compute blocks could be configured and combined to provide a viable environment for people to manage their digital lives? So, yes, I'm excited about never having to go to a website or app (where my data is currently siloed) ever again. For instance, I'd like to have a consistent shopping interface that I can configure and tailor to my needs through which I can access all shops: a personal Amazon if you will. So, I guess that means services become headless? Luckily the ubiquity of APIs makes this dream more viable. The trick is to make it understandable and attractive – and I'm beginning to think that this is the 'not the easy part'! 😉 Look forward to hanging out in FoC and sharing our experiments. Cheers!

This is really interesting - I'm a bit more sceptical about ubiquity of APIs in 2024! Many services have turned off their APIs, or limit them, especially consumer services. It's still doable though - either via instrumenting a web browser with some LLM help, or I think instrumenting Android apps in a VM would be a possible way to go.

@Francis Irving Thanks! 🎉 It's true that some large names have turned off or limited their public APIs but on the whole businesses want to get reach and interoperability. It's not clear what the general trend is yet to my mind. And I'd prefer to assume that on the whole companies want to allow their users to access their service/data via API. I'd hope it makes business sense for them. So I'd prefer to politely try the "front door" first rather than just assuming APIs are a lost cause from the get-go.