We have some huge, exciting news for Glitch and the entire Glitch community: Today, Glitch is becoming part of Fastly! We’re joining forces with the Fastly team to bring the creative power of Glitch to even more people, and to help make the internet better by making it easier for everyone to create.

First, for our loyal community of Glitch users who’ve been with us for years: you’re good, we got you. Nothing changes about your apps or your Glitch account with this news, and the changes you’ll see in the future will be about making Glitch better and even more fun and rewarding to use going forward.

If you’re new to Glitch, you should know what we’re about — Glitch is a friendly community where millions of people come together to create, share and remix web apps for work, play and everything in between. 

So, why are we joining forces with Fastly? There are a couple of great reasons. It starts with having more support and resources to keep improving Glitch. We’re hiring for incredible people to come help with this work, starting today with engineering roles on the Developer Relations team, and watch for Glitch-focused support, community and engineering roles coming soon, too. And they’ll be in good company — every single member of the Glitch team is coming along to our new home at Fastly, to continue making the site and the community with the same spirit and care that they’ve shown over the last 5+ years.

Over time, we’ll be tapping into Fastly’s incredible technologies to make it easier than ever to make fast, secure, expressive apps. Today, Fastly is best known for delivering content on the web incredibly quickly (thus the name!) and securely. But we’re also super excited about their edge platform, which will let people build new kinds of apps. We’ll talk more about that once we’ve got some specific stuff to show you, but if you can imagine the cool stuff you’d build with that power, then you’ve probably got a good sense of where we’re headed.

Most fundamentally, we know that Fastly’s whole team really understands what makes Glitch special, and has believed from day one in empowering more people to make a better internet. Glitch will be one of the most prominent parts of a broader effort to give all developers, regardless of their background or level of experience, the power to build sites and apps that are second to none. A lot of the time, when a little company becomes part of a big company, we worry about losing the things that made the little company (and its not-so-little community) really work. In this case, we’re enthusiastic and optimistic about being able to tap into the resources of a much larger and more global company to help Glitch reach the full potential that we’ve always hoped it would. After teaming up with the Fastly team last year on a partnership to give Glitch users access to Fastly’s new edge platform, we realized that we were thinking in very similar ways about how to help the most people create the most cool things possible, and that set the course for the announcement that we’re excited to make today!

We’ll share more details and updates as we go along, but for now, a great way to get a taste of what’s to come is to try out this starter app and make your own.

An Exciting Leap Forward for Glitch

Sometimes it feels like time is going by so fast, but as 2022 hops on from month to month we find that taking time out to reflect on the things that happen each month helps to demonstrate just how much is accomplished by the Glitch community each and every day. Recognizing your hard work, the kindness that you put out into the world, and the sense of wonder created by your imaginative projects is a constant reminder of how much curiosity and joy exists and the potential to discover even more. 

To complement that work, we recently gave the glitch.com homepage a long look and decided to jazz things up a little. We hope you enjoy the recent update. And, in case you missed it, our director of community, Jenn Schiffer recently appeared in a webinar with friends from Fastly and EdgeMesh to discuss Democratizing the Edge where many Glitch community shoutouts happened. Let’s continue the celebration of your efforts with April’s roundup of awesome projects, playlists, and more!

True,~park by@oa495 is an oldie but came up in a discussion about accessibility and drag-and-drop implementations. It’s such a neat example, we had to share!

~speakgame by @r0 is a game where you guess which language has the most native speakers

~emojia by @LingDong- is an online multiplayer world made ~~entirely~~ of emojis.

~whack-a-paw by @NatoshiBanamoto is a cute lil whack-a-mole game

To celebrate 9000 followers on Twitter, @adarosecannon made ~scouter!

~needle-bike is a WebXR bike configuration app that @marwie built and shared in our forum

~market-forces by @OkayHughes is a very visually satisfying art project, just watch.

~digitiser-cartoon-strip-generator is an old cartoon strip generator that @doug brought back from the Wayback Machine and put onto Glitch so it can live again!

~nails by @CharStiles allows you to click and drag in the embed for an odd surprise

~a-small-memorial by @toddwords is a beautiful, interactive memorial, part of this new online journal, The HTML Review

~dapper-lofty-elk by @ladylarisa123 is an awesome looking coded poem from an SFPC student

~aromatic-paint-tire by @ariaandsam excuse generator, anyway I would’ve loved to have gone out tonight but I’m currently looking for my wallet.

~bill-split-app is a sweet bill-splitting utility by @cool-peaches, who replied to the latest Glitch newsletter to share it!

YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR (by @OverlappingElvis lol)

~phone-from-dilemma by@aTylerRobertson is a fully-featured replica of Kelly Rowland's spreadsheet phone in the music video for Dilemma.

~lassoism is a Ted Lasso-ism generator by @danfishgold and @lexipedia.shir. That’s right, Betty White.

~dot-cats is like Dwarf Fortress but with cats by @bengarvey and @sashatgarvey

Check out these cool cats dropping in ~overly-particular by @rowan-m

~kyloscosplaycarousel by arianna1098765 is the greatest Star Wars fansite created.

Even though we love cats, ~knockitoverfinal by@haue807 is an annoying-cat simulator

~glib-shorthaired-foxglove by @Reddlake is a simple keyboard drum kit

~bluez by @RonakChovatiya is a cool audio visualizer

~build-excellent-websites by@hankchizljaw is a guide to help you...build excellent websites!

@giulia.laco's CSS playlist includes a few apps to aid in teaching CSS concepts

…and for the JS crowd...@dublinacademy's JavaScript Help playlist shows some simple JavaScript concepts

@robloxrules has a playlist with a couple of instrument apps!

We love hearing what you love about Glitch, and all of the unique ways the community experiences Glitch, or how it empowers them to create. Here is a recent shout-out. 

The app being discussed here is ~only-the-questions created by Clive Thompson and we couldn’t agree more! Read Clive’s post on the motivation behind building this project.

The biggest thanks, of course, goes out to you—the Glitch community for continuing to make the web and the world, a fun and special and interesting place to be. As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~double-pendulum-grid by @d.carverwilliams and was posted in the oddlysatisfying subreddit. It definitely earns that placement.

Sometimes it feels like time is going by so fast, but as 2022 hops on from month to month we find that taking time out to reflect on the things that happen each month helps to demonstrate just how much is accomplished by the Glitch community each and every day.

Last month on Glitch, the April 2022 edition

They say March “comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.” But the Glitch community is worldwide and knows no seasons, so we say March 2022 came in like a blobby duderino and went out like non-stop K-pop Heardle clones. Many K-pop Heardle clones. We truly love to see it! 

In case you missed it, we’re still signing folks up for Fastly’s Compute@Edge on Glitch beta if you want to give that a try. Otherwise please enjoy some of these standout projects from the Glitch community, and most importantly keep creating and keep sharing!

~pudim by @leonardoazzi is a 3D image of Pudim, a traditional Brazilian pudding 😋

~l-2d by @LingDong- is a drawing program for …drawing!

~relative-fiction by @filipnest uses the Foursquare API and OpenWeatherMap for creating dynamic stories.

This calculator by @anvesh.dunna looks so real!

~classic-ambitious-banon by @AlisonStevens is a really cool dance animation simulator!

~urjournal by@miamylva is an audio collection of people reading their journal.

~wheel-of-side-projects by@lmorchard is a spinning wheel to help decide on a prospective side project.

One from the Glitch forum Gallery is ~theglitchpwa by @tiagorangel, an unofficial PWA starter.

~jpeg-sandbox by @OmarSamehShehata lets you “interactively edit individual DCT blocks in any JPEG image in the browser”

~billowy-neighborly-sauce is a Pomodoro timer with a text area to write your code for that session. It was a 100devs mini hackathon project with several collaborators!

~serifu-sketchpad by @pts is a Serifu comic script markup editor.

~url-hosted-bookmarklet by @PatrickWeaver is a handy tool where you can save a bookmarklet code in a shareable URL!

~ai-training by @denzelsedwards connects the micro:bit to Teachable Machine.

~lightspeed-media by @avigoldman is a bookmarklet that will speed up video on webpages, and it works on Twitter!

~horo-scopes by @larainnepasion helps you learn about JavaScript...scopes

~scattatle by @darzhz is a particle simulator written with p5.js. Hitting "gravity" is very satisfying!

~sussyclicker by@PhpenixPythonCode is an Among Us clicker game 🧀

~owenwilsonwowmachine by@arianna1098765, creator of the previously featured Ryan Reynold’s hair color selector.

~only-exclamations by @samplereality is a remix of ~only-the-questions - guess which punctuation it isolates...

~livecodera by @flordefuego + @jcbcb is an awesome event page for a Women’s Day event.

~bpm-timer by @Pomax is a really cool and visual bpm timer!

~verbose-reflective-recorder by@decoded-cipher is a Morse code converter, with audio player too.

~worst-wordle by @MarkGamed is Wordle but with a slider. Mark is right, this may actually be the Worst Wordle!

~lingdle by @r0 is a Wordle clone for guessing the language based on given text

We’re collecting all of the WILDLY popular K-pop heardle clones here. 

It all started with ~heardle-kpop by@tanhuynh226 which is one of the most widely shared Glitch apps so far this year!

If you’re looking for generative art, @EricEisaman has a few here 🖼.

@DaniGatunes put together this really cool playlist of their Three.js work!

Use basic concepts in A-frame to create VR environments using these A-frame exercises.

Check out this playlist of p5.js projection mapping examples!

Hopefully, something here made you wonder, smile, chuckle, or sparked a new idea. ✨ We can’t wait to see what you do next! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~under-water-animal-sounds, an aquatic soundboard created by several #100devs students. So that’s what seahorses sound like. 🤔

They say March “comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.” But the Glitch community is worldwide and knows no seasons, so we say March 2022 came in like a blobby duderino and went out like non-stop K-pop Heardle clones.

Last month on Glitch, the March 2022 edition

Hello there, and welcome to the latest edition of the Last month on Glitch recap, written to you from the—gasp!—third month of 2022. Although it shouldn’t actually be shocking when February goes by so fast, it’s the shortest month of the year. But here we are, with another month’s worth of creative, intriguing, and delightful developments made by you, the Glitch community! 

Before we get to that, we need to quickly shout out some of the things we think could be useful to you in your next project. Last month, we teamed up with DigitalOcean to add a “deploy to DO” button to the Glitch editor. Also, we’re getting ready to announce an update for those of you who signed up for Fastly’s Compute@Edge on Glitch beta. Not on the list yet? There’s still time to sign up! 

~shimmering-planet-metacarpal by @kenneth.kufluk is a voice-activated multiplication quiz

𝓌ℯ 𝓁ℴ𝓋ℯ 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓉ℯ𝓍𝓉 𝓉𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓈𝒻ℴ𝓇𝓂ℯ𝓇, a.k.a. ~text-transformer by @pts

~jupyter-lite by @EricEisaman brings Jupyter Lite into Glitch

~speech-paragraph by @tomayac is a demo of Danny Moerkerke’s speech-paragraph custom element that “extends the native paragraph HTML element <p> and enables it to read its text out loud using Web SpeechSynthesis.”

~next-slide-please by @aTylerRobertson is a presenter-controlled slide app!

~epb by @emmettbaber is a cool link-in-bio app using A-Frame.

~digital-pottery by @high_byte is an app we’ve shared before, but it came up again on Twitter!

~multiuser-blocks by @pschroen is a really cool 3D multi-user “room” where you can throw around 3d objects.

And if you’re new to A-Frame, read more at glitch.com/webxr. Also, we love these A-Frame and WebXR playlists from @fcor, so be sure to check them out!

~rainbowfishdraw by @bscott711 is a remix of ~fishdraw but with colors and movement

~i-love-dotdotdot by @loganwilliams is a generative poem that pulls live content from Twitter (so beware of NSFW content! ☠️)

~efficacious-sudden-smoke by @jetsuko is a very clever Street Fighter arcade sim using Youtube I-Frames.

~a-slaty-in-a-gullstack by @blprnt lets you “live the experience of looking for one gull among thousands of nearly identical gulls in your browser!”

~neighborly-like-feels by @joshi22amit is a two-player dice rolling game

~rrhaircolorselector by @arianna1098765 lets you choose different hair colors for Ryan Reynolds lol

~azure-sunny-elbow by @evanbindz, named GlitchWiki, is a recreation of MediaWiki on Glitch!

~townscaper-dataviz by @pomeranian99 lets you turn data into pretty towns!

~truth-exuberant-wave by @krystenchenoweth is a collection of pomodoro sessions on Youtube. 

~bad-bridges by @ohheyitsrainy was created to map out the bridges of Pittsburgh and how structurally sound (or not) they are. You can learn more and hear from its creator in this article from Pittsburgh CityPaper about it!

~liars-wordle by @Radcliffe is Wordle on Hardcore Mode. Give them some love on the forum if you play and enjoy it!

It’s a Wordle World now, friends and we’re just living in it. Check out our playlist of Wordle clones, after you take a look at a few of our faves from this month. 

Speaking of faves, ~favle by @aTylerRobertson is Wordle in the favicon!

~trainle by @WheresAlice for UK train codes

~broadcastle by @johntcolucci is for the local news words

~worlde-word-game by @mapsmania uses countries and cities

~equinox-fast-balmoral by @AlisonStevens has you guess chord progressions!

Fun fact, 20+ of the links in this Wordles of the world are Glitch apps!

~braginator by @StuartHoughton85754 is an emoji wordle brag generator

~wordle-art by @pau-tomas lets you draw your own wordle brag!

~wordleshares by @thisismattmiller shows a distribution of wordle shares (We’ve been calling them brags, respectfully and lovingly).

~ringle by@AlisonStevens is a changeringing version of Wordle. We really admire Alison’s ability to connect such an old, “non-technical” activity to her app development.

~rewordle by @chigozienri lets you go back in Wordle time, if you dare. 

So there you have it, another month of projects that make folks think, laugh, or smile; keep up the good work, friends! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~draggy-box by @christianp which looks like a layout demo but is actually a really elegantly made game! They also made https://glitch.com/~rectangle-pals, a cool screensaver-like app. 

Hello there, and welcome to the latest edition of the Last month on Glitch recap, written to you from the—gasp!—third month of 2022.

Last month on Glitch, the February 2022 edition

Right at the beginning of 2022, we launched an all-new editor for Glitch, with the promise of lots of improvements to come. So we’re excited to talk about how Fastly is powering some of the coolest new features.

If you don’t know Fastly, they’re a super popular, super powerful platform for delivering sites and apps more quickly, reliably and securely. So we started with what Fastly is best known for — their content delivery network, or CDN. Now, when you upload assets in the all-new Glitch editor, they’re automatically delivered by Fastly’s super-fast CDN, and you don’t have to do any configuration or additional deploy process. (It even works great with assets like 3D objects, which are newly supported in the Glitch editor!)

But what’s even more exciting is the possibilities this opens up for the future. Fastly has a really clever new edge platform called Compute@Edge that is lightning fast and will let you build smarter, more dynamic sites more easily than ever. We’re gearing up for being able to publish your Glitch projects to Fastly — including the long-awaited desire to have separate dev and production versions of your app, with deploy as simple as a click. When it all comes together you'll be able to publish lightning-fast static sites and Compute@Edge will let you build more sophisticated Glitch apps that scale infinitely — with 100x faster code execution startup times than other serverless solutions!

You can try out the fast new assets in the Glitch editor today, and then sign up to join the waiting list for the exciting beta preview to come!

We’re building an all new integration with Fastly's Compute@Edge that lets you build dynamic sites without the overhead of managing a server and lets you build more sophisticated Glitch sites that scale infinitely – we're talking 100x faster code execution startup times than other serverless solutions!

Taking your apps to the Edge: Fastly x Glitch

The web has been evolving since its earliest days—creativity and innovation drive that constant change. Through vision, code, and collaboration people reshape the web and create new experiences and sometimes even new genres. That idea of people building together is why we make Glitch, and why we’re excited to give you an early look at some work we’ve been doing which allows you to deploy to DigitalOcean straight from the Glitch editor, with one-click!

Glitch is the easiest way to build the web, but sometimes you need a little more after the build. Maybe your full stack app needs more compute power as it grows. Maybe that SQLite database is bursting at the seams and you need an upgrade to Postgres or MySQL. DigitalOcean has you covered. Just bring an API token, add it to your project’s .env file, and with a couple clicks you’ll deploy your app to DigitalOcean’s App Platform. The best part? Redeploying only takes a click, so you can keep building on Glitch and make your changes live on DigitalOcean any time you want. 

Getting started is easy! You’ll need a DigitalOcean account. If you don’t have one and want to try it out you can sign up here and get $100 in free credits for new accounts. On the DigitalOcean side all you’ll need to do is to create an access token. Then, in your project,  you just need to add your access token to your .env file as a variable called DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS_TOKEN. Glitch will walk you through a couple quick prompts to get your project prepared and create a new app on App Platform. In just a minute, you’ll have your app set up for one-click deploy to DigitalOcean! 

Deploy a Glitch App on DigitalOcean

Want to learn more about the details of deploying to DigitalOcean? We’ve got a Help Center article all about it.

Our love of building together applies to Glitch, too. We share new features early because we want to evolve them along with the community. So we’ve created a playlist of apps to help you get started deploying to DigitalOcean and a form to collect community feedback. If you have a feature suggestion or you make an app that deploys to DigitalOcean we want to hear about it—we would love to feature it on the blog or in our newsletter. We can’t wait to see what you build with Glitch and DigitalOcean.

Glitch and DigitalOcean make deploying your apps even easier

Hello there! We are now in month two of 2022, can you even believe it? It might feel like January went by too fast (or not—What is time but a social construct??) but we’re convinced that’s only the case because so many things happened during the last month. Let’s recap! 

We started the new year off with the delivery of our biggest update ever to the new editor! Glitch’s editor does all the stuff you’d expect: writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., but it also has features you might not be used to! How does previewing 3D objects in the editor, or better inline error reporting sound? Check out all of the updates to the Glitch editor in the announcement post from earlier this month.

We also announced our partnership with Fastly, to bring Compute@Edge, their serverless compute platform to Glitch! Now it’s even easier to create high-quality, customized digital experiences on Fastly’s edge cloud platform through an integration that lets you deploy Glitch apps right to Compute@Edge. Sign up to join the waiting list for our upcoming beta.

However, the best part of our month was getting to see all of the creative ways the Glitch community expresses themselves on the web. ✨ Here are some of our favorite projects. 

~keyframe-string-generator creates Bezier animation curves for AI art, by @chigozienri

~synonymous-hip-tote is a graduate datavis course project that visualizes the changes in hate crime stats over administrations.

~athousandeyes is an interactive visual poem by @aceslowman

~gesture-as-meme by@liuleslie is an essay analyzing types of movement as a meme on Tiktok

~bird-oclock by @blprnt is a live clock using photos of birds from around the globe!

~korean-typing by @rebeccasaw lets you type in Hangul (Korean alphabet) on an American keyboard.

~qr-clock is a QR code clock by @pi43r. Wild how QR codes are so...normal. Wasn’t the case 15 years ago!!

~comparing-pixelated-scaling by @bhaviksingh compares the different drawing approaches of three different 2d-drawing web tools.

~dice-clock is a clock that tells time using dice by@dylanwh. Love clock themed projects for January.

@cogdog, the creator of ~twitter-time-tunnel wrote about building a “Twitter time tunnel” on Glitch, inspired by a tweet of Anil’s!

~statues-game is a game by @ma.ring.forest, inspired by Squid Games, that detects body movement to move you forward, but you better stop when the doll starts looking!

~what-kind-of-girl-scout-cookie-are-you by @slynch-github and @virginia.m.lynch, finally answers the question that has vexed generations!

Clive Thomspons wrote about his newest creation on Glitch, ~weird-old-book-finder, which is a search engine for...weird old books!

And ~random-old-book by @jessamyn of ~weird-old-book-finder that randomizes the experience!

January was truly the month of ~~ Wordle ~~ and the Glitch community took Wordle and remixed it to create delightful versions including the following:

~brdl by @hootalex, followed by the UK version. here are the ~birdcodes

Several of these have been added to this list of Wordle clones from around the world, and check out ~wordle-invaders which is a game that uses Wordle tweets to populate the field.

Wow, you all really kicked January off to a great start! We can’t believe it’s already February. 😅  As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~procedural-snowflake, another banger built by @potch which generates really cool snowflakes.

Hello there! We are now in month two of 2022, can you even believe it? It might feel like January went by too fast (or not—What is time but a social construct??) but we’re convinced that’s only the case because so many things happened during the last month. Let’s recap!

Last month on Glitch, the January 2022 edition

There’s a lot of noise and excitement around rise of virtual reality, shared environments, and something called the metaverse. Some of the biggest players in tech are eager to stake their claims, telling us that the metaverse is the Next Big Thing.

But the truth is, it’s already here. The open metaverse is 100 times as large as any of the commercial platforms, in terms of what regular people have created. The metaverse is not going to be controlled by big tech. It’s being built on open tech by a wide—and wild!—variety of creators across the internet, right now.

First, the basics: Legions of creators and millions of users have been chipping away at the metaverse for years. At Glitch, we want to give voice to all of these people and communities, so we don’t see just a single metaverse. We think the future is an open metaverse, built by a diverse set of stakeholders, from corporate behemoths to individual trailblazers. Sure, it’s high-tech experiences that happen in fancy VR headsets. But it’s also fun and silly stuff you build in your browser with friends. 

The most exciting part is, this isn’t just the future: It’s an exciting, weird, fun, inspiring present that millions of people are already participating in, ready to welcome millions more.

In short, the open metaverse is centering creators, communities and a diverse set of implementations, rather than a top-down vision dictated by any one company. If it helps, think of the open metaverse as more of a multiverse—there are lots of different realities, and they overlap and intersect in interesting ways

The loudest players in current discussions of the metaverse are Facebook and Microsoft, each eager to extend their legacy strengths into the next generation of social technologies. Horizon Worlds is Facebook’s attempt to create a shared, virtual environment to the masses, putting their Oculus line of VR devices at the center of social technology. Microsoft wants to be a player, too; they’ve been working for years  to bring their own social VR technologies to market in both software and hardware, like the business-focused Hololens.

While these tech titans have deep pockets, the truth is they’re catching up to an already-thriving market—and today’s creators aren’t sitting around and waiting for them to perfect their technologies. 

That brings us to the open metaverse, and its constellation of different virtual technologies that go far beyond the limited visions of any one company. Together, the communities of the open metaverse are defining the future of virtual spaces for play, collaboration, exploration and expression.

It is genuinely open, run by communities, not just companies. That means it's not owned, controlled or dominated by any one tech giant. At its best, the metaverse resembles today’s web in that it can be built entirely on open, interoperable technologies. It also resembles the best of today’s internet in another key way: Its biggest innovations will come from the unexpected, out-of-nowhere creators and coders, not from giant corporations. Importantly, it’s also evolving out of existing communities, platforms and technologies — it is not being built from scratch or trying to reinvent the wheel for problems the web has already solved.

The second key trait of the open metaverse is that it is huge. For example, in VR, content that makes up the open metaverse is already 100x the size  of the corporate metaverse platforms. (This comes from comparing the number of apps on centralized VR/AR/XR platforms to the number of analogous creations on open platforms like WebVR.) That size and scale aren’t yet obvious because it’s not centralized and is being created across a variety of distinct universes of content. But it is huge, and growing rapidly.

The third key trait is that the open metaverse is made of, by and for the web. You can put the web into it, and put it into the web. This is where the biggest tech companies tend to fall down the most — they’re too often building their platforms in opposition to the web, or at the very least treating the web as an afterthought. But View Source powers the open metaverse every bit as much as it did the start of the web itself.

Just as important in understanding this vision is knowing what the open metaverse is not:

The open metaverse is not dependent on hardware or software provided by any giant company, or creation or distribution platforms controlled by those companies

The open metaverse does not require connections to blockchain-based technologies (though it certainly can use them where they help solve problems!)

The open metaverse is not boring and awkward and primarily focused on how people have meetings, it’s about doing things that are valuable or meaningful or fun, and creating things that are as likely to be social and expressive as they are monetizable.

The open metaverse is not some vague vision of the future that a company is trying to pitch, it’s just a way of looking at the many thriving, healthy, fascinating, rapidly-evolving community creations that already exist today, but are too often overlooked.

Many of the most challenging technical problems already have example code provided to support advanced uses. You can incorporate 3D positional audio, stream users’ video into your 3D environment, even build a first-person shooter. All using free, open web technologies that will run on everything: desktop browsers, mobile phones, and the latest VR hardware.

There are many different subsets of the open metaverse, and some will be familiar to those who’ve been following the metaverse conversation, while others will not. Let’s consider some that get overlooked in many discussions. 

VTubers and virtual characters: The last decade has seen the rise of the VTuber, a fascinating cultural phenomenon where digital avatars are built and operated like puppets. Using motion capture and other cutting edge technologies, a wholly CG character can interact in real time with a streaming audience. And VTuber communities are often home for cultures and groups that get overlooked or marginalized in conventional gaming or media.

WebXR: Sometimes called WebVR, WebXR is a blossoming creative field that uses the familiar building blocks of the open web to construct fully immersive 3D environments. A growing ecosystem of open source code is evolving daily to address the creative hunger of thousands. A-Frame, for example, provides the building blocks for 3D scenes that run on everything from mobile phones to the latest cutting edge VR devices. Three.js provides a framework for displaying 3D assets using web technologies. Perhaps most magically, Handsfree.js is a machine vision framework that can interpret gestures and map them into a virtual scene—no controllers required.

Game-likes: This category of virtual spaces takes their navigation and visual cues from MMOs and other video games while not explicitly being about gaming. They provide a fun, lo-fi experience for community, exploration and expression without VR at all. Skittish, by XOXO’s Andy Baio, is a playful attempt at a shared digital space for digital events. While events presented on video call software cram everyone into a single, shared, flat context, Skittish provides a sense of place and movement. Like a party in meatspace, attendees can roam, clump up, mingle, and drift.  Similarly, Gather.town provides a top-down, pixel art styled environment you can fully customize and use to host events, gather coworkers in a virtual office, or hang out with friends. For curators and museum goers, LikeLike offers a point-and-click adventure through exhibits right on your web browser. While none of these resemble plugging into The Matrix, they’re accessible, fun and ready to use right now.

AR on current devices: Whether it’s playing Pokémon Go on your phone, or using your laptop to picture how a new piece of furniture would look in your living room, this is one of the most mature, and most overlooked, forms of virtual content that makes up the open metaverse. It’s especially powerful in that it can be combined with other existing capabilities on our smart devices, like location data or sensors.

This is, of course, far from a complete list. Newer technologies like spatially-aware audio are rapidly joining this list, and we’ll of course see lots of development on the glossy, headset-focused VR that the biggest tech companies are pushing, too.

How Creating the Open Metaverse is Different

When the web was just starting out, “serious” content creators were using complex and costly tools like Macromedia Director to make elaborate multimedia content. Even the early online services like AOL and MSN had proprietary creation tools that allowed for creating rich content. And the conventional wisdom was that the simple, open, text-based standards of the web couldn’t compete.

Of course, we know how that turned out. The nonstop innovation of the open web community not only caught up to what the proprietary platforms could do, it far surpassed them in reach and in creativity. We think that pattern is going to play out again, and the evidence we base that on is the fact that it’s already happening.

Building for the Open Metaverse on Glitch

There are three things that make Glitch special, each building upon the next:

It’s easy and instant to start a new project

No other product makes it this simple to share and collaborate on code

Our community loves to build experiments and samples, then give them away for the benefit of others

These factors have woven together to produce a thriving ecosystem of metaverse-style projects. We have hundreds of thousands of projects spanning VR and 3D.

In fact, right now, today, you can instantly remix dozens of potent example projects on Glitch for your experiments in VR. We didn’t build any of these. They’re labors of love from people passionate about the next frontiers of the web and social software, and proof that the metaverse is real—and bigger than any one company.

Some stuff is simple, and perfect for getting your feet wet if you’re new to the scene. You could remix a seasonal snowglobe, or riff on the latest absurdist orb memes.

But the technology goes much deeper. You can build sophisticated scenes with navigation and interaction. While this would be impressive enough, the community has gone deeper.

Realtime, multi-user environments, with avatars, are waiting for you to remix them right now. They’re a powerful foundation for 3D social projects.

The next chapters of the web promise more possibility than ever. We’re excited to support creators pushing the boundaries of immersive, social and open technologies here on Glitch. We hope you’ll dive in, join them, and build something fun.

Let's build the open metaverse

Over the last few weeks, people all across the internet have found joy in playing Wordle, the simple-but-addicting word game made by Josh Wardle. Wordle's gameplay is basically guessing letters until you've deduced the word of the day, similar to the classic game Mastermind. And no small part of the appeal is that you can only play the game once a day, and after you win, you're immediately prompted to share your win, either on social media or as a message to friends. The signature block of green emojis was mysterious enough to pique the interest of many, and helped Wordle spread like wildfire.

But, as the New York Times documented, Wordle is just as interesting for the context in which it was made. Josh made it as a gift for his puzzle-loving partner, Palak Shah, and the Times rightly described it as "an act of love". Being a community of people who make the web, our perspective at Glitch also found a lot of romance in the idea that this is a fast, simple, well-implemented web app. Wordle is a PWA that can install instantly on any device, doesn't have a ton of extraneous junk loading on the page, and it's really speedy (a Lighthouse performance score of 95!).

No surprise, then, that Wordle has inspired a host of other creators in the Glitch community and elsewhere to make their own riffs on the idea, all of which bring fun and interesting innovations to the game:

Lynn made "hello wordl" (love that name!), which describes itself as a simple Wordle clone, but it lets you play as often as you want and you can also try to guess longer words. You can check out the source on GitHub.

Potch made Worble here on Glitch, which straightforwardly mimics the original game, but set the stage for some fun and interesting remixes.

Stuart Houghton remixed Potch's Worble into Sweardle — the four-letter-word version of the game. Obviously, that one might be a little bit NSFW, but it shows the power of making it easy to remix, because a half-joking version like this probably wouldn't be worth making from scratch, but if it's just a matter of modifying an existing game to have it focus on curse words, then it's all fun, no drudgery!

And then Jordan Bouvier took the idea to its logical conclusion, creating Queerdle. Jordan warns that some of the words in this one are definitely NSFW, but there's undoubtedly a delight in creating a fully-yassified version of the game. It's an act of love in its way, too!

We expect there will be many more riffs on the theme in the days to come, as Wordle-mania reaches its peak. But in the meantime, we've gathered some of the examples above into a playlist you can check out for yourself. (Be sure to suggest any variations we've missed!)

There are big lessons from the attention and enthusiasm around Wordle that feel important to emphasize as we start a new year: