The idea for Cartesia started as a cross between a BBS and a text adventure. You could probably classify it as a MUD, but that doesn't feel quite right to me.
The need for this arose from a group chat on Signal where we lamented the need for something both richer and simpler. Richer in that it could support a wider variety of uses and conversation styles and simpler in that it could be accessed via a text interface on any device. The idea of creating a good-old-fashioned BBS was floated several times, so I started to think about my own experiences with BBS's as well as researching the history of the BBS. After several mental iterations on the idea and discovering the origin of BBS "rooms" (attributed to the Citadel BBS), the idea started to merge with others I've had about text adventure games, interactive fiction, virtual reality, programming languages and operating systems.
In my opinion, the best things that came from the Internet are the things that were created by the people who use them, the very best being things referred to as "user-generated". I don't like the term "user", but my favorite experiences have come from hanging-out in spaces that were built by the people who use them. For example, the most well-known features of Twitter (hashtags, @ mentions, etc.) were not created by the Twitter company but by the people who used it (although they were appropriated by the company later). I think what made Twitter so much fun in the beginning is that it was simple and flexible which led the people who used it to create the features they needed organically instead of being forced down a path planned by committees inside a company (I'm looking at you Zuck).
Given this, anything that I help create that involves other people is going to be designed to give those people the most ability to create what they need and avoid my prescribing it to them as possible. This led to the primary requirements of Cartesia being: joy, care, autonomy and self-actualization.
Cartesia also has the (perhaps seemingly contradictory) goals of open-endedness and implementation simplicity. The implementation will be correct when it is flexible enough that most of it's functionality is created by the people using it from within Cartesia itself but simple enough that the underlying implementation can run on and be ported to a wide range of the most inexpensive hardware.
Finally, Cartesia will qualify as a convivial tool, growing only large enough to achieve it's initial goals and then halting advancement, changing only to address bugs.
For many reasons now is a good time to be looking into ways to utilize computing hardware more efficiently, and I've often reflected on how much of what computers are used for (especially in social and networked contexts) is little more than written text. Capturing, processing, storing and moving text around doesn't require a lot of hardware so I think this is the right time for a project like Cartesia.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026