About

I’m Alex, a researcher and engineer working on discovering new ideas—or new takes on old ideas—and putting them into practice.

Among other roles, I am one of the main developers behind Cabal, a peer-to-peer group chat I took the initiative on in April 2018. I was a previous editor of the Secure Scuttlebutt Consortium’s newsletter, where I’ve also been a code and community contributor.

During 2019-2020, I researched and proposed a subjective moderation system called TrustNet for my Master’s thesis at Lund University.

Professionally I’ve worked with values-aligned startups, NGOs, and collaborated with smaller teams on everything from architectural visualisations and narrative VR games to peer-to-peer research and implementation.

Selection of personal projects:

• Cable’s moderation protocol (2024): a role-based subjective moderation system for the peer to peer Cable protocol
• Cerca (2022): a low maintenance self-hostable forum suite
• Lieu (2021): a community-focused search engine
• plain (2021): a static-site generator operating on markdown using plaintext files
• budget (2020): a backendless browser-based budget tracker optimized for phone usage
• monotome (2018): an open source wiki

Some other things:

• my writing
  • reflections on existing awash in digital information
  • questioning commercialization of the p2p space
  • the 12 pomodoro work day
  • the social media computer
• a music newsletter I published for 51 consecutive weeks, 2017-2018

Presentations

• Vouching-based moderation, P2P Basel, January 23, 2026
• Cable: A binary, pull-based protocol to ditch the log, enable deletes and who knows what else, P2P Basel, January 29, 2023
• Subjective Content Moderation: 2 + 1 flavors, Dweb Camp, August 25, 2022
• TrustNet: Trust Based And Subjective Moderation Systems, Our Networks, August, 2020
• Cabal’s Subjective Moderation System, Dat Ecosystem, July 30, 2020
• TrustNet - Master’s Thesis Presentation, Lund’s University, June 29, 2020
• Welcome to the Cabal Club, Data Terra Nemo, May 17, 2019

Interviews

• (video) Dat Ecosystem Interview, May, 2023
• (text) Solidarity Infrastructures with max, April, 2023

Supporting development

I also sell commercial software over in my itch.io store.

~cblgh