💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181112 captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:47:12.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I've been reading several very thoughtful phlogs (Jandal's, Solderpunk's, and FAX SEX among them) and I'm intrigued by the political nature of what's going on here. Let me be clear that I don't mean political in the sense of nation-state politics, with their mindless cliquey tribalism, superficiality, personality cults, and power grabbing. I mean political in the sense of thoughtfully and ethically determining how we organize ourselves and distribute power and control. I don't know what happened at SDF beyond the fact that at least one member was banned, for reasons that did not seem sufficient to some in the community. I have also read that the SDF sometimes acts arbitrarily with respect to changes in service provision[1]. Those comments parallel my experiences with a forum (crackberry.com) where I was a contributing member for years. I eventually moved my content elsewhere for a few reasons: I could no longer update the initial posts in two informational threads that I maintained; the site moderators arbitrarily moved the major thread that most users visited on a regular basis (with thousands of posts) to an "Off-Topic" forum, because we sometimes strayed off topic, though the majority of the commentary was definitely on-topic; and the terms of service changed, explicitly requiring users to accept liability rather than simply disclaiming the site's liability. In each case, I (and sometimes others) discussed the issues with moderators, but without a satisfactory resolution. I felt that my only option was to walk away, because the site is proprietary, its purpose is obviously commercial (there's a community, but its needs are clearly secondary to those of the enterprise), and the general response to critical scrutiny was unsatisfactory. Looking back, I had little reason to be upset about the experience. I should not have had high expectations with respect to what my membership in that community meant. In the case of SDF, I think users have the right to feel differently, because of the SDF's status as a non-profit and the language it uses with respect to free software and community in its mission statement[2]. Hierarchy and the assertion of control seem incongruous with the stated purposes of the SDF. In any case, it's not my purpose here to be critical of other organizations. My interest is in the response. Some of you have responded to the situation by setting up your own servers and creating your own sites. It's a logical response with a long history. People in hunting and gathering societies in northern Canada used to engage in group fissioning like this all the time, and for much the same reasons. When the group became dysfunctional, the factions would separate and reform into new groups with new leadership. Group re-fusion would also take place, with various fragments of previous groups forming new combinations. What's happening within this UNIX-verse (can I call it that?) seems explicitly political in nature. Solderpunk has given this server a political identity (Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu), complete with a mission statement[3], a constitution[4], and even a refugee policy[5]! One of the questions that occurs to me (because I'm in the process of setting up a server of my own) involves property rights, sovereignty, and power. If I set up a server and invite people to join it, yet refuse them any sovereign power because I am the property owner, am I not simply replicating the behaviour I've seen elsewhere? I think the answer to that question is yes. Another challenge created by group fissioning is to maintain connection despite the separation. Federation (a very political term!) might play a key role in maintaining those connections. Which brings up an interesting question. Do the services that federate have constitutions? How would they deal with a single problematic federated server (i.e., one that was involved in some form of illegal activity)? I'm curious and will have to look into it. I don't really have a solution to these problems of sovereignty and federation at this point, in part because I don't know what is technologically possible. Solderpunk's idea of "outposts" could serve a purpose, but as he has mentioned, he retains a level of control over the creation of those spaces, because he controls the distribution of host names within the domain[6]. Perhaps, as he's wondered elsewhere in his blog, the use of a brand name like "tilde" would permit some level of decentralization of power to occur[7]. I guess the most anarchic solution (in the proper, positive sense of the term) would be if everyone had their own server and federated? Again, I'm not sure and I don't know what that would do to the sense of community. Rather than re-inventing the wheel on these issues, I think I'll look into the different approaches to Linux development governance, given that they've faced (or not faced) these issues before. There are benevolent (maybe that's too kind) dictators like Linus Torvalds and Patrick Volkerding, and there are community-governed projects, complete with a regularly-elected leadership, like the Debian project. Maybe I'll report back. Maybe I won't. There's freedom in this Zaibatsu! Until there isn't lol ;) [1] gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20181106.txt gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/circumlunar-space.txt gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/on-sdf-and-the-future-of-public-access-unix.txt [2] https://sdf.org/?welcome [3] gopher://circumlunar.space [4] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/about [5] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/asylum [6] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/circumlunar-updates.txt [7] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/on-sdf-and-the-future-of-public-access-unix.txt