You know how it is. I love wikis. Wikis are editable websites. Starting up a new wiki is hard, however. One thing that helps is if you have a vision, a sort of framing narrative. This could be a mission, but it could also be something more specific. “Cosmic Voyage” for example is a networked writing project where people write journal entries (pages, right?) and upload them (not as easy to do as a traditional wiki and with strong ownership of pages, but still…).
You know this is a cool project when you see that it’s available on Gopher and Gemini! 😍
Today I saw a something fascinating: Midnight Pub. I watched a little video they had. On the surface, same thing: people create entries, entries can be linked to other entries, there are backlinks, it uses Markdown. I looks pretty slick.
What caught my eye, was this description of the framing narrative:
Figuratively, it aims to be the web equivalent of your local pub. a place you can go to and talk about your day with strangers or friends. then when you leave, it doesn’t follow you home. Think of it more as a speakeasy actually – hidden from the outside world but very warm inside. It’s not there to scale. It’s there for all of us to write and have a good time.
And the reason I hard stumbled upon it was “Spacewalk” – an aggregator that monitors Gemini pages for changes every now and then there was a new post by somebody: brewed, elizabeth, mondaybeer, starbreaker, BrightBlue, tmo, pygal, peclomon… and it does sound philosophically, meandering, like some people talking at a bar, maybe? I don’t go to bars. I guess I wish bars were like that! But when I go for a drink I’m there to meet people I know. We don’t talk to the people to the left and right. It’s hard to make connections. Anyway, I love it.
I love it when the framing narrative explicitly asks for a particular kind of writing, like Cosmic Voyage, like Midnight Pub.
In a similar vein, I like the bread baking theme of Breadpunk Club. “We are a shared Unix computer focused on bread: baking it, eating it, using it as fiat currency in the event of a cataclysm, that sort of thing.” Awesome!
I love their manifesto. It ends as follows:
Breadpunk rejects the commoditization of life by market capitalism. Breadpunk is an attitude that something our ancestors made largely for free is not something we should be spending money on. Breadpunk is the idea that we have time again, that industrialism gives us time to bake bread. Breadpunk is simple: MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN BREAD.
Right on!
#Wikis
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Looks like the Midnight Pub is no longer on Gemini...
– 2020-12-05 10:58 UTC
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It has been back for the longest time, now. Excellent!
– Alex 2021-08-29 21:29 UTC
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Nightfall is a virtual city that lets you meet and interact with others through your Gemini or web feed. It promotes slow-paced, longer-form writing and engaging with one-another through quotes in blog posts. – Nightfall City
– Alex 2021-08-29 22:22 UTC