I build tools for an independent internet: software for publishing, talking to people, and keeping the things we make.
These projects develop together. ANProto provides a small foundation for signed messages. Wiredove turns it into a social application. This website uses that application for its timeline. Alongside them, I maintain Secure Scuttlebot Classic, including a network that can carry the projects’ own source code.
A social application you can make your own.
Wiredove brings profiles, posts, replies, and shared media into a browser application built on ANProto. You hold the keys to your identity and can back them up for use in another browser.
Wiredove and this website’s timeline now use the same shared application. Improvements to publishing, profiles, and media can reach both through coordinated releases.
Proposed: readable web pages for individual posts, so shared links open the conversation and show useful previews wherever they travel.
Earlier interface, archived August 2026. A fresh live capture is pending.
Signed messages. Bring your own network.
ANProto is the small protocol underneath Wiredove: a signature over a timestamp and a content hash. It establishes verifiable authorship without deciding how a message must travel.
Implementations exist in JavaScript, Go, Rust, and Python. Wiredove and this site’s timeline put the protocol into everyday use; further experiments explore shared work between people and agents.
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Keeping a peer-to-peer social network working.
Secure Scuttlebot Classic continues the classic Scuttlebutt model on a modern Node.js stack: signed personal feeds, messages replicated between peers, private conversations, and shared files.
It includes Decent, a browser client with several interchangeable appearances, and Git over SSB, which lets the network carry software repositories. I use that capability to maintain copies of these projects alongside GitHub.
Built on the contributions of Dominic Tarr, Paul Frazee, Charles Lehner, and the wider Scuttlebutt community. My work on Decent began in 2016.
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A personal website that participates in the work.
This site holds my writing, recovered archive, and an interactive timeline powered by the shared Wiredove application. It is also where I use what I build.
Recent work connected the timeline to the shared application, restored support for large historical photographs, and checked recovery of the available media. Maintaining a personal site makes the questions concrete: can the work still be read, and can it be recovered?
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Four years building my own protocol from scratch, getting it wrong three times on purpose — no replication strategy, then an append-only log, then a backward hash chain that finally synced fast. The laboratory that became ANProto once every load-bearing piece had been removed. A terrible name for marketing materials.
The minimalism blog I wrote when blogs still felt like they could change your life. I lived out of a bag, wrote every day, and grew an audience without a publisher, a platform deal, or anyone's permission. Most of that work is recovered and living in the archive here.
I have been publishing on the web since 1999. Before the protocols, there was the writing: personal sites, journalism, a stint at Gawker, and photo editing at New York Magazine. In 2009 I left corporate media to publish for myself.
Far Beyond the Stars and the ebooks taught me how to reach readers directly. Working on Decent in 2016, then Bogbook and ANProto, brought the same question into software: can you publish what you make, and reach the people who want it, without asking anyone for permission?
The projects keep changing because using them keeps revealing what needs work. This site is where the writing and the software meet.
If you want to build something together, argue about protocols, or just say hello: ev@evbogue.com.