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So much cool stuff
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Greetings, gopherverse!  I've been really busy for the past few weeks,
which is why I've not phlogged recently.  This has actually been

in gopherspace and the blossoming indie-pubnixspace (which really
needs a name!), and so much fascinating meta-discussion *about* that
cool stuff.  I also feel really bad that so many of the new Zaibatsu
phloggers have been churning out really high quality, topical content
that I've not had the time to respond to yet (rest assured, I'm
reading!).  I'm hoping I can catch up a bit this weekend, but I've
been spurred to write something briefish tonight in response to some
recent happenings/posts.

First of all, let me quickly say that the launch of cosmic.voyage by
Tomasino[1] and announcement of tilde.tel by Cat[2] in response to my
"Hey you, host something"[3] have exceeded in every way my
expectations of what would come from that post.  I am *so* excited
about these projects.  Thanks and kudos to Tomasino and Cat both.
Honestly, I feel like I'm hanging out in the coolest part of the
entire internet right now.  This is awesome.

Jynx[4] and Tomasino[5] wrote some stuff about federated pubnix and,
honestly, it kind of felt like they'd been rummaging in my brain.
I've thought, and written, about a lot of the ideas they mentioned in
recent weeks, but in scattered places - emails to people, BBS posts at
the Zaibatsu, random Mastodon posts.  But I haven't done a very good
job of posting clearly thought out ideas in easy to find places, like
my phlog.

I want to sieze on one particular thing Tomasino said, about getting
the local mail on cosmic.voyage to work nicely with some Tildeverse
servers but not the wider world.

I floated precisely this idea on the Zaibatsu BBS a few weeks ago,
after slugmax and I had been talking about how to get mail working
between the Zaibatsu and the Republic which will be launched soon as
the second "colony" in the Circumlunar Universe.  It turns out it's
quite easy indeed to configure Postfix to only allow mail in/out
from/to a whitelist of domains, and of course you can use your
filewall to back this up by limiting SMTP connections to the
corresponding servers.  So I figured, why not also allow interchange
with say, SDF, Grex and Tildeverse servers?  These places are very
unlikely to be a source of spam, and if there is any trouble, the
admins of these places are likely pretty easy to get in touch with.

Nobody was actively opposed to this idea, but most people were, I
guess, uninterested, because they already have "real" email addresses
which work everywhere.  I'm thinking now of doing it anyway, just to
test the idea and the config.  Tomasino, I'm happy to experiment
setting this up between the Zaibatsu and cosmic.voyage if you like,
just drop me a line.

I think this idea extends to lots of things besides email.  Outgoing
SSH is one.  Zaibatsu users can SSH to Grex and to MetaARPA/ARPA-only
SDF servers, and that's it (though I've made it clear people can ask
for other places to be whitelisted in the BBS's REQUESTS board!).
IRC should also be straightforward.  I would *love* to experiment
with NNTP.

I've started to think of this idea as something like recreating or
reenacting the very early internet, back when all the machines online
were at universities or government/military research centers, and
there were so few an admin could maintain a routing table by hand,
looking at the hand-drawn network diagram pinned up on their wall;
where all the admins probably had all the other admins' phone numbers
in their address book.  Something like one dozen smallish, independent
pubnix servers could support several hundred users easily, while still
being a small enough set that people could configure their firewall
whitelist by hand without it being super impractical.  By not allowing
incoming connections from the outside world, it's extremely likely that
there would be no, or very very little, spam, advertising or general
abuse.  Users also couldn't get up to that much mischief, as they
couldn't e.g. send spam to anywhere in the outside world.  Just a cozy
little network of unix geeks, voluntarily cutting themselves off from
the outside world to do things their own way.  Not quite a walled
garden in the traditional sense, because the participating servers are
independent and the network is open-ended.  New ones can be brought in
if they're going to play nice.  If any server stops playing nice, the
others can choose to remove it from their whitelists.  This seems
like a fantastic way for a decentralised network of shell providers to
function.  I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20181124-cosmic-voyage
[2] gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20181128.txt
[3] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/hey-you-host-something.txt
[4] gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20181128.post
[5] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20181128-re-jynx-so-much-cool-stuff-going-on