💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181115 captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:47:13.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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It's been a busy week. I'm busy at work and have been endeavouring to set up my server in my spare time. I now have a completely working server, a dynamic dns provider, and a domain name. Yet part of me is torn by the whole experience. I like circumlunar.space and what it seems to stand for ... so do I really want to set up my own server? I don't know. The contrary position is that it's important to turn this little corner of the internet back into what the internet was intended to be: a communications network in which everyone could both send and receive directly. A few years ago (holy hell, it was 2011 ... time passes so quickly!) a Columbia University law professor named Eben Moglen promoted plug servers as a means of decentralizing the net and ever since then I've wanted to be a part of that[1]. I can't believe how long ago that was... and that it's taken me this long to do it. I've thought a lot about what to put on the server. So far, it's a gopher server. I really like gopher. It's the 'slow food' of the internet. You read long form. You think about it. Maybe you respond to it. It might also become an XMPP server. I need to read up on prosody and how inter-server communication takes place. Anyways, there's no content on the server yet. Part of me wants to start posting there. Part of me wants to stay here. Maybe I'll just connect the two through links. I've seen a few people doing that here and elsewhere. I read solderpunk's phlog on Stan Lee and comic books. It brought back a lot of memories. I used to buy a lot of used comics at a huge secondhand store as a kid. I wasn't tribal about it either. I liked Marvel and DC. I read tons of Archie and Richie Rich comics. I read some of them over and over. It's funny what a crazy little world they drew you into.... those ads. I remember the ads for Star Trek: The Movie on the back cover of pretty much every comic published in 1979 ... Sea Monkeys ... Some newspaper that American kids could deliver and earn "Prizes or Cash!" ... A write-in section in Archie comics where kids explained what they thought the year 2000 would be like.... Following up on a previous phlog, I did read through the Debian constitution and it's incredibly democratic. It's worth a read. I was really impressed by the emphases on individual liberty and control from the bottom up. One of the first substantive provisions (Article 2.1) says: "Nothing in this constitution imposes an obligation on anyone to do work for the Project. A person who does not want to do a task which has been delegated or assigned to them does not need to do it. However, they must not actively work against these rules and decisions properly made under them."[2] The developers elect (and can recall) their project leaders, can amend the constitution, and (if I'm reading it correctly) can vote to override the decisions of the project leader and technical committee. It could be a fairly good model for running an online community. The great obstacle is that, unless a non-profit society is created, some individual (or group of individuals) is stuck with the bills and liabilities, and would have to be willing to concede power to the users. That's no small thing. Anyways, I am going to watch some TV and rot my brain... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html [2] https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution