web · IRC · Flash
ArtCraft | Senior Engineers | SF (Onsite) / Atlanta (Onsite) | $150-$250k + Equity | https://getartcraft.com Those fucking rent-seeking hyperscalers took the internet away from you, and we’re going to give it back to you and to everyone. Web 1.0 was great - we had IRC, file sharing, third party chat clients. There were personal websites, forums. Flash was a format kids could use. Everything supported embedding and uploading. Websites actually had APIs and RSS. File sharing, FTP, MP3s, discs, owned media. Broadband brought our parents and grandparents online, but the shift to the non-technical majority created an opportunity to grossly oversimplify everything. Everything dumbed down into a pre-packaged product. Startups began turning their offerings into walled gardens. Platforms took precedence over protocols. APIs and access and data export went away. And then the rent-seeking began. The era of ownership ended. Corporate Memphis. Jesus Christ. We’ve rallied a massive community to build MIT/Apache-licensed alternatives to Adobe, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, Autodesk, SolidWorks, Slack, Discord, Unreal Engine, OpenRouter, RunPod, and more. The goal is full feature parity, with code anyone can own, inspect, modify, and build on. We’re digesting second-class apps and platforms into first-class applications, libraries, and APIs with full MCP support. We’re distilling out the good parts, and we’re building the connective tissue that draws them together. 100% of the internet is going to be open source soon, and we’re going to force it open. Loudly. We have eight figures in