💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › circumlunar-updates.txt captured on 2020-11-07 at 02:05:23.
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Circumlunar updates ------------------- The sundog population at circumlunar.space continues to grow at a very healthy rate. A warm welcome to dmj, losthalo, nonlinear and visiblink. I am so happy with the wonderful range of content that people are choosing to share at the Zaibatsu. Just check out dozens' rabbit hole[1] of fascinating textual excerpts. Visiblink has had an account for, what, five days now, and has already written a really handy guide[2] to using sftp to manage your gopherspace. Great stuff. And even greater stuff is to come. "Circumlunar space" is no longer a single-server affair, but is transitioning to what I am calling, for now[3], a "federation of independently administered but interconnected unix servers", where I and others will be trying to put into practice some of the ideas which are floating around the phlogosphere right now about new approaches to public access unix. The first new entity to appear in the circumlunar universe is the Red Consensus[4], run by tfurrows. It is a "circumlunar outpost", a small, experimental side-project run by a sundog, of uncertain reliability and duration. At the Red Consensus, you can administer an anonymous gopherhole without needing a shell or sftp account, using a program tfurrows wrote in Commodore BASIC. How awesome is that? Hopefully beore the end of this year, a new "circumlunar colony" will appear - a long-term, stable project designed to support a substantial userbase, like the Zaibatsu. The Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic will be a shell and gopher host, possibly more, administered by slugmax. While I hold some degree of power over the entire circumlunar universe, by virtue of handing out hostname within the domain, I will not accept any significant administrative powers at any of the other servers, as this would be against the spirit of decentralisation and resilience. However, slugmax and I will be working together very closely to ensure as seamless as possible a sense of connectedness between the Zaibatsu and the Republic. Users on one will be able to interact with users on the other via BBS, email, IRC and perhaps more. The connectedness and cooperation between the colonies will be simliar to, and is inspired by, the relationship between the servers in the Tildeverse[5]. Will the Circumlunar Universe and Tildeverse become connected in any significant way in the future? Maybe, I don't know, but I for one am open the idea. I am utterly entranced by this idea of a self-organising, ever-changing fractal network of social unix servers, with networks forming and disolving between servers and between networks themselves as users see fit. How exciting! Finally - if you have a shell account at the Zaibatsu but you haven't logged in for a long time because when you first got access you weren't terribly impressed at a tiny proto-BBS with three people talking about how great their tiny proto-BBS was, can I politely ask you to give it another try? There are now eleven people with shell access, but as you've come in one by one over several months, things have remained quiet. Let's all get on at once and have some parties! Remember that anybody can begin a new board on the BBS, so if you're not interested in cycling for some strange reason, just come and talk about what you *are* interested in! You may well not be the only one of us! [1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/~dozens/ [2] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/misc/phlogguide [3] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/universe [4] gopher://consensus.circumlunar.space:70/1 [5] https://tildeverse.org/