The State of Lurchbox
You may have read the longer piece I wrote about Lurchbox--the one about the internet we were promised, the one we got, and why I'm building my own corner of it. You may have seen only the follow-up updates I posted on Facebook for a couple of months. Some of you might have clicked through at random--maybe a cat staged a coup on the keyboard--and have no familiarity with Lurchbox at all. In any case, you're in the right place. This is a short state of the project from the inside: what it is, what changed since I wrote the big vision essay, and where it still has room to grow.
Lurchbox is a self-hosted web app I'm probably just writing for myself--a personal dashboard and, increasingly, a place to publish. The name is a dumb joke that stuck: Lurch answers when you ring, Thing puts the right thing in your hand before you've finished asking. I wanted software that felt like that on my side of the screen, not another feed optimized for someone else's revenue.
We're not wrong to want an interface that belongs to us. The fatigue is real whether you run servers at home or you're just tired of living in tabs and apps that don't answer to you. Lurchbox is how I'm living inside that conviction instead of only complaining about it. I haven't fixed the enshittified web for anyone--not even for myself--but I'm a little closer. This is the shape my resistance is taking.
What's different from when I wrote the manifesto is that the publishing side stopped being hypothetical. A lot of the work went into a real blog on my own stack--drafts, going live--so I'm not handing long-form writing to a platform first and hoping I still own the idea on the other side. The other half of the vision, the automated pull side--agents, feeds, the "butler" stuff--is still there. Pull isn't the only story anymore. Pull and push were always both in the picture on paper. In practice, the push half demanded its turn.
There's still a pile of "should" on the desk: images in posts so I can drop screenshots without pain, and a real decision about whether Lurchbox is one collaborative surface with a single public face or a multi-tenant platform--then lining the code up with that and actually using the invite flow I already built. That's for later paragraphs in the story, not for pretending the blog half didn't need to ship first.
I also stopped pretending the architecture could stay comfortably single-user forever. If we mean it when we say "mine" and "yours," boundaries have to be real in the structure of the thing, not a courtesy. That's the same instinct as the long essay, just expressed in code and data instead of rhetoric.
None of this is the full picture I sketched. Calendar next to logs, books wired to posts, the long tail of glue and integrations--most of that is still ahead. What I have now is something I can run, use, and point at when I say I want my words to live somewhere I control. The gap between vision and build doesn't embarrass me. It's what an honest project looks like when you're trying to be both principled and real. It's what people call a minimum viable product, if you like the jargon.
If you read the manifesto and nodded along, we're still in the same conversation--just farther down the trail. I'm not pitching a product. I'm reporting from the workbench: this is what landed, this is what's still open, and I'm still building it because giving the whole stack away to platforms that don't love us back hasn't gotten any more appealing.
The internet we wanted is still something we make in small pieces, on our own terms.