Back in Febuary, I was going through some articles on social.coop a mastmastodon instance that describes itself as being `A Fediverse instance for people interested in cooperative and collective projects.`.
As im likely to do, I have been slowly networking and checking out all the culture and discussions from the instance to self inform and make myself a slightly more informed netizen. The content on the site is especially resonating since
I love cooperatives and have wanted to create a similar structure for myself and other developers in Colorado. Which, is in itself another rabbit hole but ill digress. I stumbled upon a really interesting looking
descent social that promised this idea of an unconference which, at the time I hadn't known was a thing. Intrigued I read through the site
and realized that I had missed the party by a few days. Nothing seemed to remain from the event, no streamers or downed flipper zeros. Just a whole lot of nothing. So I decided to dig in.
First, I scrapped together what links I could find, which lead to a cryptpad.fr sheet, full of links and schedules. Which, also explained the format, which like I said earlier was new to me. Personally digging the idea of having conferences so self driven. Using libera.chat and matrix was neat as well, I hadn't used matrix before so I was keen on learning what that technology was good for. So many IM platforms come and go its always neat to find another one. Im talking about you Gitter - I never understood why these technologies splinter so much and so far. But that could be its own blog article.
Second, i followed the dead link to a neat platform called meet.coop which looks like a really neat conference tool that would have cleaned house in 2020. So I ended up marking that down as possible software and kept moving on as I still didn't have any of the information outside of the schedule id found in that cryptpad.
Finally, I ran dry of the main site so I went over to google and started searching. One of the first things that turned up was a hackmd article from 2022-12-09, that lead to a github account over at descent-social which didn't have much. Looked like it was just the website that was being served at the top of this article. Hmm
So back to the google board. Using some other source control exact matching. I turned up a win on codeberg which is another gitea, forge, kinda repository of repositories. Seeing their codeberg site was great and made me feel like I was onto something because in there was NOTES!!!! Not just any notes mind you jekyll notes.
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So I had notes and could finally attend the party but that was only the start.
One of the notes, this one, made mention of a mysterious speaker known as @hoody. This person went on to speak about SSB (secure scuttlebutt) protocol and their drive to create something from distributed web communities.
Personally, having tried other network like Nostr, I was intrigued by the choices that this speaker had disscussed, specifcally I loved the idea that the platform was fully anonymous, stay on your phone, and seemed like a platform you could just jump on and off as ya pleased.
The one problem. Was I couldn't find a link to a beta of it at all.
So that started my next rabbit hole adventure, which was to find 'atacama'.
Rather then go through the steps above, id say a good amount of searching for that user brought me to a twitter user tag of `hoodownr` that had done a really neat indiegogo campaign a few years back. Also found a patreon for that person, but it wasn't setup. Also ran into a dead end on github.
But, after putting hoodownr into the github search, I ran across a user of the same name and while the account seemed barren except for a few repos. The about information had a twitter and what appeared to be a link to moderator.rocks. So I intrepidly clicked the link.
Nothing says fun and excitement like a homepage on IPFS and an android package you have to trick your phone into downloading. Regardless, I was excited to see this and some of these descriptions brought to mind my own thoughts about bluesky, twitter, etc
Well, in any case I had found the project that I didn't know I wanted and have been using the very small android application to post small wins throughout my day. Its refreshing given all the new development into decentralized social platforms that this one seems to be small and has given this a lot of thought and really feels like its a labor of love.
In conclusion, it was a really fun follow breadcrumbs. Im really hoping next year to catch the meetup and see what other projects people are presenting.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/events/ <-- found a scuttlebutt!
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updated: 16 September 2023.