Changelog - March 24 2023

Everything comes full circle!

If you look at screenshots of Vito from early 2022, you'll find a UI not unlike the one that just shipped. Internally, I called it "boxier", and it came out of a bunch of discussion with Doc where we decided that the existing UI was working against us, pulling in so many directions that it was often confusing about which way to go.

This update doesn't get us all the way, but it does make a start.

The fundamental thing that our UI didn't acknowledge was that in a fresh Vito hub, you can get a long way by only creating posts. I experienced this last November, where I created a Vito hub for Hearth, and ran it stripped down. The gang who attended Hearth used it to share updates, post pictures and generally hang out online.

Posts.

In Vito we've also expanded on posts by building out a comprehensive page system for adding whatever content you want, but that's somewhat at tension with the model of posts and posting to a feed.

I've also been using Mastodon lately, and enjoying that. What Mastodon has led me to is being more interested in the Indie Web movement. Vito doesn't embrace that at all, but it serves as a basis for running with ideas from folks who believe in the open potential of the web.

So what's in a UI update. This moves us toward the goal of Vito to help support the full lifecycle of running events.

Initially, you probably want to start simple. You just set up a hub, and immediately you can post things. For short form, there's posts, and for longer form there are pages (maybe we need to blur the lines of these even more).

Posts can be public or private. Pages can be public or private.

Once you start gathering participants, you can invite them into your hub and they can contribute posts, introducing themselves, discussing topics.

Over time, you can run events. You add events and their details to a "hub", and folks can access those events online. You can stream video directly to the events, and folks can participate in discussion.

And afterwards, you can create pages that bring everything together.

For much of the development of Vito, we've been building primitives ... all the little bits that can be joined together to create compelling experiences. Admittedly, we lost sight a bit of creating affordances for helping to put all the bits together.

Hopefully this update serves as a beginning toward addressing that.