Micro-pubnixes, local flavour and two-tier structure

Here's a quick post which will not do any of the ideas contained

within justice.

cmccabe recently phlogged about the future of pubnix[1], which is

obviously a topic close to my heart these days. I'm glad he linked to

colorfield.space, which I have been negligent in doing myself. He

also coined the phrase "micro-pubnix" for pubnix servers running on

small machines like Raspberry Pis, which I think is great. Squeezing

multiple users into a small machine is a fantastic practical

demonstration of the absurd extent to which modern computing life has

inflated system requirements far beyond what is actually needed.

sloum has already replied[2] and raised what I think is an extremely

important point to keep in mind as we see more and more discussion

about federated content between interconnected pubnix systems, and

that's the importance of what I'll call "local flavour". If all

servers are interconnected with all others via all possible channels,

and the same content is accessible from everywhere in the same way,

there is a homogenising effect which results in servers being

perfectly interchangeable, which is an impediment to building strong

communities. It's also a recipe for conflict when people with

different values or norms for online behaviour are forced to interact

in the same space.

My recent post[3] about recreating the early internet via whitelisted

connections between pubnix servers completely failed to mention this,

but not because I hadn't thought about it. I elaborated on my idea a

little in an email to jynx, wherein I described the idea of a

federated pubnix-verse with a kind of "two tier" structure. The basic

idea was that all individual servers could be interconnected to some

extent using established, standard tools like email (SMTP, POP and

IMAP) and news (NNTP). Sticking to established standards means pubnix

admins can use off the shelf software and their existing knowledge to

connect with one another. Mail and news are also systems with very

well-established tools for controlling what you receive, in the form

of spam filtering and kill files. This lets people practice what jynx

calls "voluntary non-engagement" with people they don't want to

interact with. Adding structure to this fedpubnixverse would be

voluntary tighter integration between groups of servers, making them

"subverses". The tildeverse is, I think, history's first pubnix

subverse, and circumlunar space is on track to be the second. I

imagine subverses being connected, in addition to the mail and news

connections they necessarily share by virtue of being part of the

larger verse, by more synchronous forms of communication like IRC or

XMPP, but also by experimental forms that require close coordination

and cooperation between admins. An example of this would be the

rsync-federated BBS that is being established between the Zaibatsu and

Republic (much progress on this front has happened in recent days,

stay tuned!). This two-tier structure lets like-minded people "huddle

together", permitting local cultures to evolve and different norms of

conduct to be practiced, but also permits user-controlled

interconnection over the whole verse so that nobody needs to be any

more isolated than they want to be and there can be verse-wide

discussion of, well, anything that needs to be disussed verse-wide.

This seems like a nice model to me and once the circumlunar subverse

is fully interconnected I will be reaching out to other people about

mail connections and, later, news.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/~cmccabe/06-hexachloraphene.txt

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/~sloum/phlog/20181210-22.txt

[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/~solderpunk/phlog/so-much-cool-stuff.txt