4m00se philosophy and the story behind

The idea came to life as a response to a dev.to challenge for building smart-contract based decentralized apps on the Stellar network. For quite a long time I wanted to create something meaningful based on blockchain technologies and useful outside the realm of decentralized finance, closer to the developer tools area, which is near and dear to my heart.

4m00se is meant to be a seamless replacement for existing centralized form building solutions, as I had found that most of the technology companies in web3 world still use web2 providers for that.

The name "4m00se" ([fôrmo͞os]) comes from a leetspeak'ed word "form", and the author's love to moose as animals — their strength, wisdom, and kindness.

Domain name 4m.lol was selected following the same leetspeak logic, just with no moose mentioning (for brevity). Also lol resembles 101 which sounds like a good metaphor for an app aspiring to provide full-blown solution for forms. Interestingly, this domain name was on sale at Porkbun for $1.50.

The project in its core is a kind of B2B2C solution, meaning that the application itself is a platform for creating and managing embeddable forms, but at the same time, it yields the way for customers to gather any information from their users via the resulting form artefacts.

The root philosophy of 4m00se is making information collection and information submission transparent, trackable, and independent from intermediaries. Importantly, the solution for that is meant to avoid dumping the complexity of traditional web3 approaches on users and abstracting all the clunky parts away to achieve seamless non-intrusive user experience.

At the same time, as the way 4m00se generates forms and embeddings appeared to be very simple, configurable, and concise, I decided to go the "progressive decentralization" route. It means that I'm going to allow users to use the builder as they want — with or without decentralized storage/authorization capabilities.

All in all, the idea got focused on enabling simple and configurable form generation and response tracking via embeddable HTML widgets and optional powerful blockchain authorization mechanisms.