--- author: - "[[Erlend Sogge Heggen]]" published: 2025-01-08 date: 2025-01-09T10:32:24-08:00 link: "https://blog.muni.town/selling-dreams/" tags: - "clippings" --- Make a $10 bet on where Weird will be in a year from now, and we will do our very best not to disappoint. Every paying customer is also an automatic stakeholder in the Weird indie enterprise. We stealthily released v0.2 a month ago, tied in at the end of our latest musings on web agency. ![](https://blog.muni.town/favicon.ico) As 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. > Today, the cornerstone of my [re-constructed web-identity](https://blog.erlend.sh/reclaiming-my-digital-identity) has been placed firmly in the ground! > > [`erlend.sh`](https://erlend.sh/) 🪨 ![](https://blog.commune.sh/content/images/2025/01/IMG_2649.jpeg) Design by [palyzambrano.com](https://palyzambrano.com/), implemented by [zeu.dev](https://zeu.dev/) After 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. ![](https://assets.den.dev/images/icon/apple-touch-icon.png) I 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/).) ## Paid Subscription: Weird Nerd The 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. 🪙 ****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. **Three people (founders not included) snagged a slot before this announcement, so there are 22 to go!** For the remainder of our Beta-stage into mid 2025, subscriptions will cost $25/yr. **To buy a subscription, you need to:** 1. [Register on Weird.one](https://weird.one/) 2. Go to your profile at `weird.one/yourname` 3. In the bottom left you'll find 'Manage Subscription' (We're well aware that it could be [more streamlined](https://github.com/muni-town/weird-website/issues/25); working on it!) ### A note on domain names All new signups get four random numbers added to their account name, like `yourname7788.weird.one` We 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. This 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. Right 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. ## Paying for a dream If 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: *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.** Every 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. A fellow nerd recently asked me: > What's your ambition, ultimately, with Weird? My response: **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.** --- ## Web Portals A 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. ![](https://blog.commune.sh/content/images/2025/01/monsters-inc.webp) [Monsters, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters,_Inc.) poster And, 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. Anyone 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. We 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.** Only 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🚪 Coming next to our little corner of the weird web, roughly in this order: - [Custom themes](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/issues/11) - [Collaborative writing (CRDT)](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/issues/264) - [Login with Bluesky (ATProto)](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/issues/206) - [Private content](https://blog.muni.town/capabilities-and-identity-with-leaf/) - [Teams and Projects](https://github.com/muni-town/weird/discussions/20) (👈this is where the socializing begins in earnest)