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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim:

* Podcast apps

* Music listening apps

* Feed readers

* Bluesky clients

* Note-taking apps

* Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps

* Chat and instant messaging

* Time trackers

* Recipe managers

These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not necessarily the best, not necessarily the most globally competitive, but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.

Music.app is a miserable experience, and I can just tell as I use it that it's miserable trying to serve me. But Apple long ago factored all the meaningful bits out of Music.app into MusicKit. Why am I still using Music.app? MusicKit is the real product now. This is new.

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The common denominator: the data needs to be owned by you, or at least made accessible. Companies love to create walled gardens where they own the content and control how you access it, making this kind of personalized interface impossible. Hopefully we can push back more now.

The ability to quickly make an API connection + custom UX means that companies with a sub par website / app but a good data API are more valuable to me than the world class fancy website with a locked down API.

At work I have a great brain dump + TODO list tracker via custom API + MCP into confluence, using confluence pages as the app state. The website is so bloated it takes like 20 seconds to go from "idea" to getting it written down. Im now able to avoid all of that and make ~ MY ~ perfect UX while still being a good corporate employee.

I agree that owning the data is ideal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129841

I mean, hold up, if that thought lights you up I'm happy, but I don't actually think that's the common denominator. I used Things.app to track projects for a long time and ultimately fell out of love with it. Things.app didn't own my data; it's a pure UI app.

But now it occurs to me: I know precisely how I work, I know what patterns are valuable to me, I know when and how I need to remind myself of things. I don't know why I haven't already started building my Things.app replacement. But I'd guess I have it to a place where I'm happy by this time Saturday.

Honestly, it's harder for me to think of daily-driver apps where this wouldn't be the case. I guess vector graphics editing? I'm not going to vibe up a vector editor. But I'll bet all the money in my pocket that 5 years from now, the real value in vector graphics tools will be their API/SDK, not the packaged application experience.

I'm not following your reasoning about the common denominator, not sure we're on the same wavelength about what I meant. I'm claiming that in order for an application to be "reclaimable", you have to be able to access and manipulate the data under the app. Some applications currently work that way now, lots of them don't.

For example, we can "reclaim" non-DRM ebook readers, audiobooks, and music players that play local files or use an open API. But a company-specific walled garden streaming DRM'd ecosystem will be almost impossible to build around.

You're talking about entire systems. That's something to be optimistic about too. But it's actually not the thing the comment you responded to was about. I'm not saying I'm excited to get out of the Apple Music ecosystem (I like Apple Music, the service, quite a lot). I'm excited to get out of Music.app, and into my own custom Apple Music player; one where playlists and play history are simple, sanely-schemaed sqlite databases.

I gotta be careful, I'm going to talk myself into staying up late tonight building that.

I was too, thinking about making my own apps for a lot of stuff, but for now I’m sticking to web apps because distribution on mobile is still crap.

Why are you distributing at all?

> didn't own my data

Ownership can have different forms. Slack.app that doesn't let me easily extract code snippets from a thread - owns me. Jira that forces me to use their imbecilic, quirky wysiwyg owns me. Note taking app that keeps the data in their db and not my files - ain't my friend. The friction is the ownership. When extraction requires effort, the tool has leverage over you. It's a subtler form than data lock-in - behavioral lock-in. You adapt your workflow to what the tool makes easy, and gradually the tool's affordances shape what you even think to do. information gets buried in threads, search is mediocre, export is hostile. The "solution" they offer is to stay in Slack/Jira/Dropbox/Evernote/Notion/etc. longer, search in Slack, link to Slack, screenshare in Slack, summarize with AI in Slack, don't ever leave Slack. The tool becomes the answer to the problems the tool creates.

Plain text, local files, standard formats - they don't fight you on extraction because there's nothing to protect. That's why investing in FOSS tools is almost always paying for your own liberation rather than your own imprisonment. Even when there isn't feature parity, even when the FOSS tool doesn't have a "polished UI" and it's "maintained by a teenager in Nebraska" - still a better choice.

Not necessarily, you can ask the LLM to reverse engineer the protocol.

Many of them have been reclaimed. Check out the "awesome self hosting" GitHub repo.

Podcasts: audiobookshelf

Music: 500 different subsonic clients, many of which are good. Or some fun tuis

Feed readers: lol, more than there are grains of sand in Torvalds' flippers

Note taking: again innumerable, also, just use nvim or emacs of course

Chat: tons of very good self hosted options that can save orgs thousands a month.

Rather than build your own from scratch, rediscovering already solved issues, why not contribute to or fork a FOSS project? LLMs make it easy easier to get up to speed on large projects

Audiobookshelf is a web app! Like, if you had a good TUI music player, I don't think you'd be rebutting my thesis here. I don't doubt anybody's ability to build TUIs.

The point of the post is the emacsification of the native macOS (and Windows, I assume) environment. Totally reasonable not to care that it's occurring, that's not really responsive to the post, is it?

I was responding to your comment that nerds should reclaim software that's overwhelmingly professional and pre packaged by sharing that there already is FOSS software for the categories you listed, which imo represents nerd reclamation.

Audiobookshelf has a native android app, not sure about desktop, I only use it on Android.

Anyone can build a TUI sure but why try to rebuild the whole mpd client/server stack that lets anyone on your network play music from the several TB collection of FLACs on your NAS? Same for subsonic, why reinvent the client server protocol there when it's already solved? And for subsonic clients, why reimplement streaming, offline downloads with de-duping, stream bitrate, album / artist handling... If there's something a subsonic client doesn't have that you want, fork it, point claude at it, done! That probably falls within the emacsification thing, right?

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS.

This is an experiment towards that:

https://github.com/dharmatech/9social

The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...)

Video demo:

https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI

The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code.

And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavily inspired by an Emacs project called Org Social:

https://github.com/tanrax/org-social

> decentralized local-first social network that is based on git and plain text files.

Nice! This sounds just like what I'd been thinking the system should be like.

But how do you manage identity/authentication , or discovery of other users?

> how do you manage discovery of other users

Here's my personal profile on 9social:

https://github.com/dharmatech/9social-user-dharmatech

Each profile has a `following` file which shows who they're following:

https://github.com/dharmatech/9social-user-dharmatech/blob/m...

So, once you know someone on the network (now you know me!) you can see who they follow. And who each of them follow... And so on.

> how do you manage identity/authentication

Well, each user's profile is just a git repository (possibly on github). So I'd think about identity/authentication in the same way users think about it for their code projects.

If you have specific scenarios you're wondering about, feel free to ask.

> Nice! This sounds just like what I'd been thinking the system should be like.

Cool! Thanks for checking it out!

I love this idea. Thank you for the examples!

I've been thinking of this as well:

Something like old school Facebook in UI, but functions more like MSN Messenger. You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.

> You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.

Yup, local-first is central to the design.

And, you only see who you explicitly follow.

I love your username!

I hope there's a sympy-thagoras out there.

( • ‿ • )

Sounds similar to scuttlebutt

I absolutely LOVE secure scuttlebutt (SSB).

Their local-first approach inspired that aspect of the 9social design.

However, a big difference is that SSB is a sophisticated protocol.

With 9social, the heavy lifting is done by git and a set of conventions.

> I love this idea. Thank you for the examples!

Thanks for checking it out!

If you also want federation, end to end encryption, offline mode and collaborative edition, have a look at https://nextgraph.org

How to upvote in bold? /j

It's plan9 so:

"There's a filesystem for that."

¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

* Time trackers

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/timeivy

An unfinished spreadsheet-based interface for entering time. Meant for consulting, but never got around to persisting the data. Mostly created it because I couldn't stand all the ways that time trackers force users to enter structured time when there's a cute algorithm to handle just about every way a human might naturally enter time.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/49185071/59087

* Recipe managers

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/recipe-fiddle

In the days of LLMs, it would be far easier to categorize ingredients and format them into TeX for publishing as a PDF file. The idea behind this project was to let people essentially copy/paste recipes off the web or scans of handwritten content and autoformat it.

I just made a one-shot Android music player because I need a very simple one to listen to tracks to practice drums, and I need to go back from the beginning a lot of time, reduce speed, open them from Whatsapp when my teacher sends them to me and access easily the last 4-5 played. There was nothing in F-Droid that ticked all the box so I just made my APK.

What would be amazing now would be a way to deploy my own Claude-built utility applications to my phone without having to go through the effort of securing a Mac developer account and going through that whole rigamarole.

In my case, PWA installed via Safari work just fine.

Have you tried?

To be honest, I haven't! I think I'm a bit gun shy from having managed mobile build infrastructure in the past and so haven't really had the urge to do anything involving it...

I'd add Email to the list.

Email is right there waiting for disruption.

Google wave rides again!

I'd say the thing with email that most improvements would need improved standards?

That said, as with the emacs user example, the ability to automatically process all your email in madly custom ways can now be opened to the masses.

Can you elaborate?

Music apps especially went downhill, spotify and tidal etc need to offer apis so we can integrate several sources in one app. They used to offer much more. I was able to import my library into spotify once (thoigh it could only hold 10k item back then). I want all my music in one place, not 4 apps

They don't offer APIs precisely so that you can't integrate several sources in one app.

I have Gonic (a subsonic server) on my home server and my client is a perl script. It basically allows me to search for an album, present a prompt for me to select the best match, and then builds up a playlist for the tracks to pass to MPV. That’s pretty much all I ever need. I would gladly dump the whole spotify client if they had an API to do the same (even if the queue is a long stream of data instead of tracks).

Someone wrote a web server in assembly the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080587

It is very inspiring.

> but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.

Yep, I'm doing this all the time. I've been doing it for a year. The silliest on is an IG post previewer. My app is better suited to me than the preview function that Instagram provide itself.

Don't forget browsers (not EWW).

... actually, now that Servo was released to crates.io, I wonder how long it will take before `C-x w t` does exactly what I'm wishing for.

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