About Speaker

Hello!

I'm Puffball, a 26 year old software engineer with a passion for open source and federated systems! Though I'm not the most common sight on the grid, I've been working in the background on a rust implementation of the protocol for my viewer project called Benthic!

I was raised on free to play MMORPGs, captivated by the way the worlds were shaped by the players, and natural friendships could arise between anyone anywhere in the world based on an almost-physical proximity to one another. But, I was also heartbroken when those worlds would shut down, or would be changed drastically to become more profitable by the company that owned them.

My dream, going as far back as middle school, was to become a software engineer who could create an open source, user-owned, user-run game that couldn't be ruined or taken offline. In college, when I found out about the metaverse protocol, I realized that my dream was already a reality, and I just needed to contribute to it!

https://benthic-mmo.github.io/