The Founding Federation Cohort Alpha room was the loudest place in the building. Most weeks had a business hour, then a technical hour, and what came out of it is the showcase in the middle of this issue — maps, privacy tools, a visual novel, a handful of Claude skills and one very cheap domain name.
We shipped a lot too, and most of it is unglamorous: a merch lab, sponsor-a-seat donations, email preferences, a What's New card and a few absurd homepage themes. If something here is wrong or you want it gone, email me — it's one email away.
This issue was assembled by AI from what was shared in Multiverse chat rooms and the school's changelog. Want your piece changed or taken down? Email [email protected] and it's done.
Two sessions, June 27 and July 11. ronnie posted the slides and the first session recording at the top of the curriculum page. The questions in the room ran from iFixit to postmarketOS device lists to whether a cracked iPad can be a monitor.
June 19. Students tried writing their own audience descriptors and argued about co-opting — and I reminded them that a meme generator is a fine backbone for content.
Over six thousand messages in the cohort room this quarter. Spencer ran the business hour (Smallest Saleable Thing), neek ran the Shipping Software hour after it, and most mornings ended with somebody posting a live URL.
Claude skills for copy editing that keep the author out of forever-feedback loops. A second bundle, neon-jetpack, adds a user-journey-mapping skill and one for prepping copyrights.
“Writing copy is my kryptonite, so I made two sets of skills for Claude to keep me out of the "forever-feedback" loops I sometimes get stuck in.”
because of this class, I finally had the guts to publish the github repos with a github page.
Open source, in practice
Students in the Intro to Open Source room compared notes on leaving paid tools. b33n sorted his own moves into four buckets — replace it, contract it, build it, or abandon it out of spite. Canva became Krita. Zapier shrank to a free plan with a single zap. A lot of excessive systems turned into static sites.
v: (nodocs) went through the ranking behind openalternative.co and found it sorts by stars and forks, age, and how recently a project was updated. Those tell you a lot about reliability and nothing about whether the thing fits your work, so research each alternative. Their own pick: Obsidian user, Joplin fan, even with Joplin sitting at #3.
quail recommended khoj to someone asking how to organize a pile of audio files and transcripts without handing them all to a hosted model.
Writing a tavern in Ink
The Interactive Fiction class worked in Ink, the scripting language behind a lot of branching stories. I shared inklewriter and Ink as starting points, then posted a sample scene to the room — you enter a city, walk into a tavern, and order an ale or not. One variable, has_ale, changes what you notice when you sit down. That's most of the idea. As one student put it, you're only telling it what should happen if someone chooses a direction.
What we launched
01site
Merch Lab
A merch page with a roll mechanic, plus an admin side for backgrounds, fonts and products.
02site
What's New card
A card and nav link on the student dashboard that says what changed.
03site
Sponsor-a-seat donations
Donations that fund scholarship seats, with a capacity check on the scholarship pool.
04site
AI Problems Index submissions
You can now submit entries to the AI Problems Index. They go through a moderation queue.
05site
Email preferences
Unsubscribe links and per-sender preferences on school emails, plus a Terms and Conditions page.
06site
New homepage themes
Abyss, Genesis, Ecosystem, Murmuration, Cellular Automata, a physics lab where the page becomes a rigid-body demo, and more of the demoscene theme.
07site
Alumni re-attend
Past students can rejoin later cohorts of a class they already took.
On campus, logging in during a class now puts you in the classroom, and there's a Go to Instructor shortcut. Matrix handle setup moved into onboarding.
From Agentic SDLC, Interactive Fiction, the mesh room, Music Praxis and Practical Propaganda.
No. 01StatusAgentic SDLC
A new home for the African Violet registry
In beta
The African Violet Society's 1998 registry lost its developer, so goblinmatron is building it a social collection site ("think Ravelry"). The tech committee is on board, and beta QR flyers went out at a convention.
“I think AI coding is PRIME for this kind of thing where there are folk out there with some technical expertise and some deep knowledge about something unique.”
The evening after class, dvs_corry added an editor persona and a hook system that scores each chapter against a rubric, which he had the AI interview him to write. In the same room, phraktyl runs critic and security-reviewer skills on every merge request, with a loop:eligible label for idle agents.
dvs_corry
No. 05Hardwaremeshtastic-newbies
A Heltec V4 case from scrap birch
mixternoodles laser-cut a case for his Heltec V4 radio from scrap birch plywood at his makerspace.
The Intro to Open Source class set b3n off on what he calls his spite project. He stood up spite-box-1 on Hetzner with Ansible, swapped Canva for Krita and Penpot, cancelled Teachable and two WordPress plans, and sorted every tool he uses into Replace, Contract, Build or Abandon. By late September he was moving Navidrome onto a dedicated server. "Oh how far I've come since attending Intro to Open Source Software back in May."
Fixing the audio for everyone
Alex Southwell (@saphid) had an agent rebalance the audio on quiet class recordings so classmates could hear them, and Liz asked for the fixed versions. Separately, he volunteered on DreamWidth's open-source performance issues with a team of agents.
have been trying to refollow the guide with each project and am finally starting to feel like I get the flow
On the mesh bandwagon
After infrastructure failures in New York, kt joined the mesh effort. kt also gives away native seeds and potted plants, guerrilla-gardens, and has a solar node up next. "So I'm the mesh bandwagon (thank you Liz & CJ)."
A mesh for Bristol
artemisbear went to a potluck with Mother Cyborg about building a mesh in Bristol, UK, and a local group is now planning one. "there's a group of us plotting now and I'm so excited! 💖"
Gracias por la clase! es la primera que asisto en el multiverse y fue bien util.
Take it twice
rodmiranda shared a workflow for running Agentic SDLC on a small plan: a statusline, a model chosen for each stage, and token budgets. He also told a newer student to retake the class. "I would recommend going to the class a second time. That's when the learnings really started to solidify for me."
Wedge issues and teen resources
In Practical Propaganda, hazer wrote a long analysis of how conservation became a wedge issue. hazer is also building a civic info-sharing platform, because a social worker had to track teen resources by hand. "Humans on mass aren't that hard to figure out. It actually just takes therapy tools. It's weponized empathy."
i believe cooking is an art.
En el salón de español
From the Spanish cohort in June: gailhantson is building the Blue Team Tech Writing site and newsletter for the Founding Federation. starquixote built a game prototype "que querÃa hacer desde hace años" (that they'd wanted to make for years). And claudiobosques: "mi idea es crear productos educativos para cuestiones polÃticas y de pensamiento crÃtico en español" (my idea is to create educational products on political issues and critical thinking in Spanish).
Pick a learning path. Recordings and curriculum, or live class seats too. Every class is pay-what-you-can, and scholarships are open to anyone who needs one.
