Situated Software – Clay Shirky (2004)

> Situated software isn't a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users, and a refusal to embrace scale, generality or completeness as unqualified virtues.

I read a paper about social media being the way it is because of it's scale above other factors[0]. There's something to be said for small, purpose built software networks that never intend on eating the world.

I wonder if the barriers to entry for building stuff like this is going down. Maybe there's still hope for a network of networks that looks more like this.

[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03385

Thanks for posting! Wild that that 20 years ago Clay put a name to these niche tools that are now trivial to make with vibes and an API key.

Also fun to see a mention of Dennis Crowley's proto-foursquare group project from grad school

Great article, from an age where so much was new and exciting (in maybe good ways).

Robin Sloan a couple years latter with "home cooked software" comes to mind. It's very down scoped, individual, where as situated software can still be somewhat broad scale. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423

Then recently, Maggie Appleton's Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers has been very popular & recurring, which talks to how much more accessible it is to build your own home-cooked software, in this LLM age. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/6/home-cooked-software/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490737

To ramble off the beaten path a little, it'a a bit unfortunate to me that this all has to be its own class of software. Ideally I'd love to see existing systems and software be better able to be resculpted and shaped by the users, to be flexed into new forms. Accessibility people in particular have a huge edge up here, with much more enriched views of whats on the screen/page, but generally it feels like software wants to be left alone, wants to be what it is (an ego). And that's never felt very "soft". Malleable Software / Malleable Systems would let us better situated our software to the time places and forms of use it finds itself in, would make software better embody the soft. Hoping for more. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=malleable https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237881 https://malleable.systems/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857551

Situated software ought be less of its own distinct class, and more what we can do with the many many soft malleable bits of software about us. Perhaps scripted, plugin-ed, or cooked or glued together via LLM help.