Personal Projects
Services that I'm building
These are projects that address challenges that I am either particularly passionate about, or
for which I believe I can contribute to the solution space in a unique or rarified way. I seek
out opportunities to apply my knowledge and experience in ways that enable people to live
lives more productively, securely, and generously.
In general, I don't intend to profit financially from these personal endeavors. They serve as
a way for me to experiment with new ideas and to hone my craft.
Fostering a culture of generosity
The idea for Friendowment arose from the thought that we could all be doing more to
proactively address the financial needs of the communities that we exist within. At both a
spiritual and a human level, I felt that the American ideal of individualism when it comes
to matters of governance should not extend to matters of family and community. And we should
be thinking about addressing that need before it arises, rather than only when an adverse
event occurs.
That line of thinking led me to build a financial tool that would allow communities to
partner together to establish shared financial assets that could be drawn upon by individual
members of the community autonomously, according to controls built in to the assets, when
the need arises.
Enhancing privacy in federated social networking
The rise of decentralized social networking services like Mastodon and Pixelfed based on
common standards (e.g., ActivityPub and WebFinger) has been exhilirating to watch. It's
empowering to take some amount of control of our digital lives back under our own control.
But the reality of that shift reveals that the privacy challenges imposed by centralized
platforms do not disappear. Particularly in the case of complex applications like Mastodon
and Pixelfed, most participants essentially just shift the trust placed in the Twitter and
Meta corporations to relatively unknown individuals running and securing servers at their
whims.
One of the risks of using someone else's infrastructure is that the administrator often has
full access to data that users might otherwise consider private (e.g., Direct Messaging).
That's a problem that I sensed I could address and have been building toward solving with
the end-to-end privacy technology in Enigmatick.
