Gavin Owens

luma.comDialog Community Call #1: How Tonk uses Dialog · LumaDialog is an embeddable database for local-first software: facts you own, synced through any storage, queried with Datalog. Dialog Community Calls are monthly…

I am a very earnest person (American) and serious poster, but since it’s Sunday here is a picture of me and Ulriich, our house pigeon:

Gavin Owens reposted

gozala

@gozala.io

We'll be doing first dialog community call on October 27. If you have any interest in dialog please stop by luma.com/ony3ob91

Whenever I’m feeling down or envious I just remember that so little is needed to max out the human experience; I already have enough and that is the best any human being can do. The rest is for the love of the game, so go out and enjoy. A little reminder for you all today.

@neurocy.bsky.social showing off hazel. Fun fact, the IDE we built at my old company Deco had some similar features like inline elements for data types, like sliders, but it was done in such a dumb way that hazel makes me ashamed and embarrassed because it is very impressive.

@feelingof.london If you wanna know why it’s so special, they renamed it from future of code to feeling of compute and that’s all you need to know to know!

I will release the lecture we held on digital micropublics as a tonk, but first we must support streaming because the recording is 4GB 😱 it’s in the works!

10 Sept

Beep boop beep boop tonk

7 Sept

My god, what have we done to the computer?

5 Sept

I have a recording of the lecture and discussion with a 50min interlude clip of Guattari interviewing Tetsuo Kagawa. Where to release it?

5 Sept

What is a digital micro-public? That is the main question of today’s upcoming event. We will broadcast live from the Termite Undermound in London today at 2pm BST. Tune in @ tinyrad.io, going to be very special.

5 Sept

Kat Macdonald (otherkat.com) is a London-based sound and performance artist exploring collective practice and public space through technology, transmission and alternative pedagogies. She is the founder of the London Community Laptop Orchestra…

Grateful to facilitate the governance workshop at @localfirstconf.com. If this is interesting to you and you would like to be added to the chat group on this topic, please DM.

14 July

@chee.party and @mimi.computer sharing the joy of computing with us at @localfirstconf.com

14 July

For any designers working on AI UX: “Ambiguous output is the death of the flow state” - @spiralganglion.com

inkandswitch.comLab Day at Local-First Conf: Berlin, July 12th - July 14th, 2026Part of the 2026 Local-First Conf in Berlin.

14 July

Will be hosting a workshop on Digital Commons Governance at www.inkandswitch.com/events/2026-... at 11am today. Please come with questions.

13 July

Also spoke with @patternist.xyz today about integrating @automerge.org for collaborative text documents and got ✨that feeling of a real open source ecosystem.✨

13 July

Kind of mind blowing that this would work and actually be really cool.

Eileen (╹◡╹)@bumble.blue

My dream open and local setup for playing with computers: @pi.dev as the harness, @tonk.xyz as the database, @atproto.com for identity, and @iroh.computer for sync 👾👾👾👾

12 July

If you ever need to describe to someone why how we build (and collectively own) the web is critically important: “Internet is the infrastructure of infrastructure” - @robin.berjon.com

11 July

Been very inspired by the strong ethos of @getdweb.net !

5 July

Good to be in Berlin for @getdweb.net and @localfirstconf.com!

github.comSponsor @tilesprivacy on GitHub SponsorsWe believe that privacy adoption at scale must work backwards from preserving utility. We aim to deliver “just works” experiences through best-in-class privacy-focused engineering while offering un...

2 July

I've been prototyping a new playing deck in Tonk for @getdweb.net . Here's the browser and edit tab. I make a lot of changes through my agent (it's useful for pulling information), but obviously I need to go in and tweak the copy or correct it in places.

Gavin Owens reposted

feynon

@ankeshbharti.com

27 June

A small ask from the local-first community. I’m speaking at @localfirstconf.com in Berlin about @tiles.run, but this year the conference isn't able to cover speaker travel. I'm trying to raise $700 through Github Sponsors to cover my flight. Any amount helps. github.com/sponsors/til...

19 June

I read this and it was like seeing color for the first time.

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There is a twisted irony for companies right now. In Satya's latest article "A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable," he warned about a future where "a few models eat everything they see." That phrase captures the bet companies are making right now whether they realise it or not.

That's why our core technology is open sourced under MPL 2.0. Why on-premise hosting is easy. Why our services work like dumb pipes that move your encrypted data around on your behalf. We physically can't do anything else.

discord.comJoin the Tonk Discord Server!Advanced technology for human scale software | 100 members

A 10 trillion dollar economy sits on top of Linux today. We wouldn't have the digital economy we have without it. Tonk's bet is that openness, neutrality and user control will be the strongest long-term position. Come discuss: discord.com/invite/hBPQ9...

Organizations need a place where agents and people come together around a piece of work. When your business processes can all speak the same language, the knowledge generated by one workflow becomes available to the next.

Tonk is built on the belief that sovereign architecture will make or break the firm in the age of AI.

This is what @tonk.xyz is designed for. A data sponge that absorbs all the decisions, data points, business signals, all that tacit knowledge, and makes it available to the model at point of use.

The loop becomes the new IP of the firm. Every workflow accumulates tacit knowledge unique to your business and compounds your token capital.

It starts with model replaceability. That's the first golden rule of durable advantage. Treat the model like a contractor you can replace. Treat the knowledge layer like the company veteran you can't.

Once models become interchangeable, the source of differentiation shifts from the model itself to the knowledge and workflows surrounding it.

The fix, according to Satya, is to invest in what he calls token capital. The AI capability your firm builds and owns. Accumulated knowledge, workflows, decisions, context that your AI systems learn by operating inside your business.

In order to achieve sovereignty, companies need an open ecosystem that can give them tools for success. You won't have a business unless you own the systems accumulating the knowledge that powers your AI.

Companies must rapidly adopt AI to survive. Yet that same adoption is setting them up for failure. The more they rely on external models to do the work, the more their advantages and margins disintegrate.

discourse.atprotocol.communityWeb Standards and the Fall of the House of Iamus (Alex Russell)Every feature begins life as a non-standard proposal, often shipped. This is not a bug. This is Alex Russell’s post on web standards, and has a lot of discussion about W3C working groups. I found i...

8 June

Like policy makers, working retroactively.

Boris@bmann.ca

I found a really great article around web standards "Every feature begins life as a non-standard proposal, often shipped. This is not a bug" that I shared with @blaine.bsky.social last September. Thread in the forum discourse.atprotocol.community/t/web-standa...

The industrial revolution organized companies around the production line. The computer revolution organized them around the database. What will be the organizing principle of the AI revolution?

You can read it like a document, edit it like a spreadsheet and ask AI to reason over it like a system. Every interaction sends a signal back to the system; where people and machines cultivate a unified context through shared objects in order to achieve a common goal set by you alone.

discord.comJoin the Tonk Discord Server!Advanced technology for human scale software | 96 members

If that excites you like it does me, hop into our Discord and let’s have a chat. discord.com/invite/hBPQ9...

The industrial revolution organized companies around the production line. The computer revolution organized them around the database. What will be the organizing principle of the AI revolution?

This is what I'm working on at @tonk.xyz . Tonk offers a local-first unified view over your data and makes accessing that unified view ergonomic to both the human and the machine.

What does it mean to be ergonomic to the human? Imagine working with software as if it were a programmable document.

The industrial revolution organized companies around the production line. The computer revolution organized them around the database. What will be the organizing principle of the AI revolution?

The tools we use today naturally separate context. They make working with context challenging. They naturally promote fragmentation, because this is how data was best organized for a computer. That’s historically been a blessing and a curse.

In order to unlock the full benefits of AI, we need new tools that allow us to bring together a unified view for a team of humans and machines, while keeping that context local-first and owned by the people creating it.

The industrial revolution organized companies around the production line. The computer revolution organized them around the database. What will be the organizing principle of the AI revolution?