folkjs

Digital Topology & Economic Power The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, ...

Wrote a mini-essay, "Digital Topology & Economic Power", on how the file went from a site of user agency to one of enclosure — through proprietary formats, data internalization, then the cloud. Each step bundling real gains with a quiet transfer of power.

www.orionreed.com/posts/app-fi...

What are your favorite visual critiques of software? On my mind right now are:

1. "The long tail of user needs"
2. diSessa's monolithic apps vs computational media
3. (a recent favorite by @todepond.com) "wish these apps could talk to each other"

collaborative HTML spreadsheets

It's so so wild what a weird universal man machine interface the world has actually gotten: ARIA tags in DOM.

And it should come as little surprise (given the engineers inability to abstract their own universal communication protocols) that it becomes the #m2m system too.

contrarian bet: html-first sync engine

bsky.app/profile/chri...

What would it look like if accessibility infrastructure became the foundation of malleable computing? Here's a demo by @orionreed.com that adversarially adds find and replace functionality to a hermetically sealed messaging app.

"Live Programming in Hostile Territory", a paper by me and @chrisshank.com, just got accepted to LIVEPROG!

folkjs.org/live-2025/

The abstract of the paper: “Live programming research gravitates towards the creation of isolated environments whose success is measured by domination: achieving adoption by displacing rather than integrating with existing tools and practices. To counter this tendency, we advocate that live programming research broaden its purview from the creation of new environments to the augmenting of existing ones and, through a selection of prototypes, explore three adversarial strategies for introducing programmatic capabilities into existing environments which are unfriendly or antagonistic to modification. We discuss how these strategies might promote more pluralistic futures and avoid aggregation into siloed platforms.”

Our paper called “Live Programming in Hostile Territory”, was accepted by the LIVE 2025 workshop (liveprog.org)!

It’s the first paper we’ve both written, so we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

folkjs.org/live-2025/

Really enjoyed "Live Programming in Hostile Territory" by @chrisshank.com and @orionreed.com: folkjs.org/live-2025/

They are doing some great stuff with @folkjs.org, y'all should check it out.

I quite like the framing that my research explores what HTML6 would look like if HTML had computational media instead of limiting itself to just being hypermedia. Check out what that looks like in our latest research notes for @folkjs.org!

Notes from the Lab - June & July 2025

github.com/folk-js/folk...

A packed month of explorations, we wrote a paper, DOM sync, Desktop Interlay, DOM interactions and instruments, HTML pipes, HTML attributes for syntax highlighting, LSPs, and reordering lists, and much more!

Notes from the Lab - June & July 2025

github.com/folk-js/folk...

A packed month of explorations, we wrote a paper, DOM sync, Desktop Interlay, DOM interactions and instruments, HTML pipes, HTML attributes for syntax highlighting, LSPs, and reordering lists, and much more!

some thoughts on browser metaphors and the same-origin paradigm! 🧶

Notes from the Lab - May 2025 · folk-js folkjs · Discussion #39 This month is all about adversarial malleability and ways to do this on the web! Orion's Talk on "User Agency in Other People's Websites" Recently Orion gave a talk at J On The Beach summarized as:...

Notes from the Lab - May 2025 [Better late than never!]

github.com/folk-js/folk...

Adversarial malleability was on our mind this month... canvasifying web pages, network indications, peer presence on any web page, and much more.

Notes from the Lab - May 2025 · folk-js folkjs · Discussion #39 This month is all about adversarial malleability and ways to do this on the web! Orion's Talk on "User Agency in Other People's Websites" Recently Orion gave a talk at J On The Beach summarized as:...

Notes from the Lab - May 2025 [Better late than never!]

github.com/folk-js/folk...

Adversarial malleability was on our mind this month... canvasifying web pages, network indications, peer presence on any web page, and much more.

Sponsor @folk-js on GitHub Sponsors folkjs is a research lab by Orion Reed and Chris Shank exploring radically different directions that we can interface with the web.

Our sponsorship page is live! Your support helps keeps our research open source, permissively licensed, and actively maintained! Our goal is to be able to work on this research full-time and, if possible, sponsor future collaborators!

github.com/sponsors/fol...

Notes from the Lab - April 2025

A new name, sponsorships, and explored a bunch of explorations trying making the web a more editable medium!

github.com/folk-js/folk...

Notes from the Lab - March 2025

Custom HTML attributes, space transforms, peer-to-peer WebRTC + DOM sync, and much more!

github.com/folk-systems...