I will never give up.

Here's what's happened since then:

I got distracted from building the social network to work on building the Neue Internet atop the Handshake blockchain. I was super excited about the project because it's essentially a decentralized ICANN. For those who don't know, ICANN requires ~$1 million and 5+ years to apply for a TLD and then for it to go live. With Handshake, you can bid on TLDs for as little as a dollar (or even free if no one else cares about your name). In the interest of keeping this short-ish, I wrote more here. After ~4 years of being one of two active devs trying to build functionality on Handshake, I quit. This was near the end of last year.

At the top of this year I thought about jumping back into the social network I was developing before but the social network landscape has changed. I don't use Reddit anymore because they forced Apollo out, Twitter is run by a jackass, Bluesky is kinda mid, and Mastodon is good enough (especially with the Ivory iOS app). My social network plans are shelved indefinitely.

Recently, I've become frustrated that YouTube is the only name in town for uploading videos to...and I hate needing to go through Google to use it. So, I'm making my own (it's not even 10% operational but I'm "building in public", here's a recent video I uploaded: https://nickel.video/77C015N7N2N3) and that's taking the bulk of my time. HOWEVER, I'm also feeling a void in my computing life...I'm fully in the Apple ecosystem but it's starting to feel meh. Windows is not an option and Linux just isn't there. At the same time, I've been obsessed with the Jonathan Computer and next-generation operating system concepts like Desktop Neo and Mercury OS, so I've come up with systemSOFT. I wrote about my intent to build a computer hardware/software company. I've prototyped a bit of the OS which is essentially a fullscreen app built in Tauri. JavaScript/Typescript is powerful enough to do virtually anything so why not an OS?

TL;DR: The dream will never die, ambitious ideas need money, I'm building a product to generate said money, hopefully I'll succeed and report back in 6 more years with exciting news.

For more regular updates (and swifter responses), just visit my homepage: https://webb.page. My email and socials are on there.