Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)

Discussion (4 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dang•about 10 hours ago

Discussed at the time:

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237881 - June 2025 (114 comments)

dmdiefjeidnn•about 1 hour ago

I always find these ideas funny. Been working with computers for decades and never once have I thought software “malleable”. Maybe back when I had to actually type the program into my Speccy to get anything to work… but then again it wasn’t a “let’s make software malleable” situation, it was more of a “this is how we can distribute software right now” type of thing.

Software was never malleable. User agency is a tale you tell yourselves to try and justify your rose-tinted glasses. Could things be better in computer world? Absolutely. But you could’ve ask us the same way back then and the answer would still be “absolutely”.

myaccountonhn•5 minutes ago

Weird, I use emacs and form it as I please, and I do have agency. The way you describe it, I don't exist.

mickael-kerjean•25 minutes ago

Malleability is a great answer to avoid the death by a thousand feature where you bloat your software because a company asked for something 99% of your users don't care about. That's the path I went with for my open source work [1], and unsurprisingly plugins represent more than 10x the code than what the core provides.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)

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Discussion (4 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews