Programmable Chats with Sup
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Recently I wrote about what the social apps of the future might look like architecturally, e.g. hallucinated servers paired with onchain features. But what should a social app actually feel like?
William M. Peaster Mar 19, 2026 • 4 min read
Frankly, I think a great one should be centered around the delight of expression; it should firstly be a hotbed for creativity, a place where interesting people and experiences cross-pollinate and exciting, unexpected things happen accordingly.
Maybe to an extent Twitter had this atmosphere years back, but that Twitter is dead. The reality is the bloodthirst for growth and monetization and funneling users into certain behaviors has drained much of the joy out of social media's reigning giants.
If we want a better way, it won't be coming from the top then. It'll have to be an upstart challenger that breaks through by elevating user expression as its foundation and not an afterthought. And while good projects come and go, one new app that I think has a great shot here is Sup.
Why Sup feels fun
I've followed Dom Hofmann, the cocreator of Vine, since 2021 when he worked on iconic NFT projects like Blitmap, Loot, and Nouns. In 2022, he cofounded Sup with Totally, and recently they've been building out their eponymous app, which is now available in early access for Apple, Android, and desktop.
Sup isn't a crypto app per se, though it does have read-only Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) capabilities tucked in for those inclined. It's like a cross between Discord, Snapchat, and Tumblr but with an embedded superpower, Patches. In other words, messages as programs.
The big idea is that patches are small JavaScript programs that you can create and deploy inside your Sup chats.
Of course, if you're like me and don't know JavaScript, just feed this reference doc to your LLM of choice, and then you can simply talk patches into existence and iterate from there. You also get a personal "Notebook" chat in Sup that you can use for privately testing your creations. Below is a silly "Good Luck Button" app I made in seconds as an example, which tracks luck points every time its button is pressed in the chat.
As you can see then, when you run a patch in a Sup conversation, whether it's just with yourself or in a group chat, the code executes inline and returns something back into the feed like an image, a video, a piece of interactive HTML, a mini-game, etc.
You can build very simple experiences with patches or very complex ones as such, since patches can hold persistent state across users and chats, respond differently based on who's using it, generate new content from user inputs, call external APIs, make reads from Ethereum and L2s, chain different patches together, and so on and so forth.
These possibilities make the Sup experience playful and dynamic and wide open.
Your messages are composable and programmable and can be interactive and remixed endlessly, yet these technical elements aren't heavy. You can deploy preexisting patches in basically one click just like you'd deploy a GIF on X.
This is why Sup feels like a digital playground. Its builders are trying to make something that's streamlined for self-expression and that's actually enjoyable to spend time in. Ideally, a social media app should make you feel good and like you have a place to freely experiment. I haven't felt that in a while among the biggest apps, but I've felt it from Sup, which seems very promising to me.
If you're interested in trying Sup for yourself, early access is currently gated by invite codes so you won't be able to immediately dive in. But in my opinion it's worth the wait and worth having on your radar. Start thinking up patches ideas in the meantime so you can hit the ground running once you're in, I say.
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