The bmannconsulting.com website
bmann.ca
1---
2author:
3 - "[[Erlend Sogge Heggen]]"
4published: 2025-01-08
5date: 2025-01-09T10:32:24-08:00
6link: "https://blog.muni.town/selling-dreams/"
7tags:
8 - "clippings"
9---
10Make a $10 bet on where Weird will be in a year from now, and we will do our very best not to disappoint.
11
12Every paying customer is also an automatic stakeholder in the Weird indie enterprise.
13
14We stealthily released v0.2 a month ago, tied in at the end of our latest musings on web agency.
15
16
17
18As explained therein, I'm already getting great value from Weird in its nascent MVP stage as a personal-page generator. Weird has helped me put my root custom domain into active use, thus *taking up space on the web* as a sovereign individual.
19
20> Today, the cornerstone of my [re-constructed web-identity](https://blog.erlend.sh/reclaiming-my-digital-identity) has been placed firmly in the ground!
21>
22> [`erlend.sh`](https://erlend.sh/) 🪨
23
24
25
26Design by [palyzambrano.com](https://palyzambrano.com/), implemented by [zeu.dev](https://zeu.dev/)
27
28After 35 years of living, ~25 of them as a netizen, I finally have my very own front door on the interwebs. Now the [POSSE](https://indieweb.org/POSSE) journey begins in earnest.
29
30
31
32I paid $10 for the privilege. That's the all-important feature added in this release: accepting payments. (Shoutout to the excellent [Polar](https://polar.sh/).)
33
34## Paid Subscription: Weird Nerd
35
36The earliest of Early Adopters can now buy one year of our Weird.one premium service - affectionately named 'Weird Nerd' - for the low-low price of $10 (*80% off!*) for your first year and $25 (50% off) for the next.
37
38🪙
39
40****Only the first 25 people to purchase a subscription get to buy in at the heavily discounted $10**** and be forever remembered as the **Earliest** of Early Adopters.
41
42**Three people (founders not included) snagged a slot before this announcement, so there are 22 to go!**
43
44For the remainder of our Beta-stage into mid 2025, subscriptions will cost $25/yr.
45
46**To buy a subscription, you need to:**
47
481. [Register on Weird.one](https://weird.one/)
492. Go to your profile at `weird.one/yourname`
503. In the bottom left you'll find 'Manage Subscription'
51
52(We're well aware that it could be [more streamlined](https://github.com/muni-town/weird-website/issues/25); working on it!)
53
54### A note on domain names
55
56All new signups get four random numbers added to their account name, like `yourname7788.weird.one`
57
58We do this because Weird aspires to be a *high-trust network* that strictly minimizes inauthentic activities. The numerical suffix is one of several measures against anti-social behavior such as domain-squatting and bot registrations.
59
60This is doubly important in a pluralistic social web in which people who sign up for a free sub-domain on Weird may want to use that as their username on e.g. [Bluesky](https://bsky.social/) as well; we want all accounts representing our community to be authentic and trustworthy.
61
62Right now the only way to claim a non-numerical username is to buy a subscription. However, in the near future we will also enable free users to unlock this perk by having their [trust level](https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/) elevated, as a result of pro-social behavior that verifies their positive intent in the network.
63
64## Paying for a dream
65
66If unlike lil ol' me you need a bit more from Weird to get tangible value out of it, that's to be expected at this *first MVP* stage. But hear us out:
67
68*Make a $10 bet on where Weird will be* [*in a year from now*](https://blog.muni.town/weird-2025/)*,* and we will do our very best not to disappoint*.* Pilot customers always have an outsize influence on a new product's direction. In particular, **we'll be building whichever data importers our first active members are asking for.**
69
70Every paying customer is also an automatic stakeholder in the [Weird indie enterprise](https://blog.muni.town/weird-inc/), similar to how the [Subvert coop](https://subvert.fm/) functions. How exactly that will work is for the early adopters to decide.
71
72A fellow nerd recently asked me:
73
74> What's your ambition, ultimately, with Weird?
75
76My response:
77
78**I want Weird to be my digital ‘soul pod’. It’s the *digitized me*; the source from which all of my other digital being springs forth.**
79
80---
81
82## Web Portals
83
84A personal website is a lot like those door-portals in [Monsters, Inc.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0198781/) that magically pipe personal homes into a vast, invisible network existing in another dimension, made real by the vividness of our imaginations.
85
86
87
88[Monsters, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters,_Inc.) poster
89
90And, spoiler alert, such a magical network of colorful characters can only be sustained by playing mutualistic (win-win) rather than antagonistic (win-lose/lose-lose) network games.
91
92Anyone signing up for the Weird 'social network' today will notice something unusual: There's no *feed* on weird.one. No *firehose*. Not even a *connect* button.
93
94We are very intentionally starting our co-creation of a [*weird web*](https://webdirections.org/blog/reweirding-the-web/) by merely occupying web-space together; there's **no content-production imperative.**
95
96Only after grounding our digital selves will we introduce connectivity bit-by-bit, carefully connecting doors together by peer consent. We intend to go slow enough that all participants in the Weird-net experiment can appreciate the full implications of opening doorways into their digital home🚪
97
98Coming next to our little corner of the weird web, roughly in this order:
99
100- [Custom themes](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/issues/11)
101- [Collaborative writing (CRDT)](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/issues/264)
102- [Login with Bluesky (ATProto)](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/issues/206)
103- [Private content](https://blog.muni.town/capabilities-and-identity-with-leaf/)
104- [Teams and Projects](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/discussions/20) (👈this is where the socializing begins in earnest)