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

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”.

	▲	mickael-kerjean a minute ago \| parent [-]
		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

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dang 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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)