I'm a little late making this announcement, but as of a few days ago, for the first time in approximately two years (since the launch of the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic sometime in late 2018), a new circumlunar colony was launched. The Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency (or "the Soviet" for short) is a public access OpenBSD server offering shell accounts, Gopher hosting and Gemini hosting to a maximum of 48 users. The Soviet will be fully federated with the existing Zaibatsu (32 user cap) and Republic (64 user cap) colonies via email, our IRC network and our home-grown BBS system (where posts are synchronised between servers via regular cron jobs using rsync over ssh), bringing the total capacity of the decentralised, text-based circumlunar community up to 144 sundogs. This extra capacity comes just in time, with the Republic having recently hit its user cap for the first time in its history. You can read more at:
The announcement phlog post by Soviet admin Katolaz
The announcement phlog post by Republic admin Slugmax
I'm very excited by this development! The explosion of interest in Gemini this year has kind of distracted me from Circumlunar Space, but I am very keen to start pushing the balance back in the other direction in 2021. I still think the federated pubnix model with deliberately constrained userbases is a beautiful thing, ticking so many important boxes with respect to decentralisation, privacy, collective governance, genuine community building, DIY-ability, and doing online socialisation and discourse at a human scale and with an appropriate balance between ingroup-outgroup accessibility.
I am hoping that there will be a lot more happening in Circumlunar Space in the coming year, and not just because of new members arriving to the Soviet. In the early days of the Zaibatsu, a lot of great software development happened in a fairly short time, with projects targetting the needs of pubnix communities. This has since slowed down a lot, in fact pretty much to a stand still, in part because our immediate needs were met, but also because our git hosting and workflow were never really smoothly transitioned to something which put Zaibatsu and Republic users on equal footing once we became more than a single server. We're talking about ways to address this now, and I look forward to something concrete coming out of it and a possible second iteration of experimenting with cmccabe's "pubnixes as hackerspaces" concept.
I'd like to close this post with a big "thank you" to my fellow circumlunar colony admins Slugmax and Katolaz for making this wonderful community possible, and to pubnix admins everywhere for helping to maintain and grow the most exciting part of the internet. Cheers!