Catching up...
Eric Harris-Braun · September 11, 2026
We haven't posted anything here in 4 years. Yow. That's a bit of dereliction of duty. But it has been a long-time problem of mine that I like building so much more than talking about what I've built. So, this is a bit of a catch-up post, just to summarize what's happened here over these years. Thank goodness it's easy to ask an LLM to find the first commit of every repo!
As you can see below, our focus has landed on Moss. It started out with We and has just grown from there. But since we're a lab, there's been no shortage of experiments, with many more to come.
The Moss tools
These are the tools you can install in Moss today, in the order they were started. "Became a tool" is the first commit that wired the app into We (Moss's earlier name) or Moss; "day one" means it was built as a tool from its very first commit.
| Tool | What it is | Started | Started by | Became a tool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acorn | State-of-affairs trees for project management | 2021-03-23 | Connoropolous | 2024-01-29 |
| Notebooks | Collaborative Markdown editor | 2021-11-03 | guillemcordoba | 2022-06-28 |
| Glass Bead Game | A turn-based game of co-creation for generating ideas together | 2022-01-17 | jhweir | 2023-12-26 |
| Who's In | Scheduling events and tracking agreements | 2023-03-20 | LeosPrograms | 2023-10-24 |
| Emergence | Conference and event management | 2023-04-05 | zippy | 2024-04-04 |
| Vines | Group conversations and DMs | 2023-04-07 | ddd-mtl | 2023-05-24 |
| Converge | Group decision-making | 2023-05-25 | LeosPrograms | 2023-10-24 |
| Kando | Real-time kanban boards | 2023-07-10 | zippy | 2023-10-11 |
| Gamez | Customizable tabletop games | 2023-07-20 | zippy | 2023-10-19 |
| Talking Stickies | Real-time sticky-note boards | 2023-08-29 | zippy | 2023-10-11 |
| Files | File sharing and sending | 2023-09-01 | ddd-mtl | day one |
| Presence | Video calls | 2023-12-23 | matthme | day one |
| Slate | Real-time collaborative whiteboard | 2024-01-22 | zippy | day one |
| Spreadsheets | Real-time collaborative spreadsheets | 2024-02-06 | zippy | day one |
| DataTub | Airtable-like data management | 2024-03-04 | zippy | day one |
| Ziptest | Simple network performance testing | 2024-08-27 | zippy | day one |
| Farmhack | Open library of farming solutions, methods and tools | 2026-01-27 | zippy | day one |
| Ark | An archive for a community's written record | 2026-08-18 | zippy | day one |
A few of those first commits aren't really the beginning. Vines and Files start with an "initial import" from Damien, and Acorn's history starts with a single commit of everything, so the code is older than the date says.
The plumbing
| Project | What it is | Started |
|---|---|---|
| Syn | The real-time collaboration library most of the tools above are built on | 2020-11-11 |
| electron-holochain | Running Holochain apps inside Electron | 2021-08-24 |
| We | The first version of what became Moss | 2021-09-17 |
| Moss | The group space all these tools run in | 2023-11-21 |
Other experiments
And the things we started that never became Moss tools, or haven't yet. A few of these have ideas in them that I'd like to take further, and Where, Place, Ludos, Branchy, ZipZap and Tempo are the ones we may well pick back up.
| Project | What it is | Started | Started by |
|---|---|---|---|
| scrabblebag-hc | A shared Scrabble tile-bag, for playing on a real board over video | 2020-07-28 | qubist |
| Where | Group self-awareness: placing yourself on shared maps and spaces | 2021-08-17 | zippy |
| Who | Personas and profiles in the context of We | 2021-10-01 | zippy |
| Attestations | Verifiable claims: who said what about, or to, whom | 2022-02-17 | zippy |
| Place | A Holochain take on reddit's r/place pixel wars | 2022-04-04 | ddd-mtl |
| Mementer | A chronogram maker, for cyclical pictures of time | 2022-10-04 | zippy |
| Ludos | Collaborative dungeon building and playing | 2023-01-07 | zippy |
| Treepeople | Recording visits to trees | 2023-08-15 | zippy |
| Branchy | A hierarchy for organizing attachments and resources in We | 2024-01-29 | zippy |
| ZipZap | Ephemeral messaging | 2024-04-13 | zippy |
| Sharefeed | Sharing websites, videos and other web content with your people | 2026-01-01 | zippy |
| Tempo | Collaborative scheduling on a full calendar UI | 2026-05-01 | zippy |
I'm being told that I should "build less and share more." Well, not sure I'm going to be able to build much less, but I do think I should be sharing more, so keep an eye out here.