On SDF, and the future of public access unix

There has been a little bit of drama on the Mastodon SDF instance

recently. Well, that's probably an exaggeration, the happenings seem

to have been totally ignored by 95% of the instance, but whatever.

Well-known and well-loved phlogger and aNONradio DJ Cat had his

Mastodon account suspended in retaliation for making a toot outlining

problems with (I suspect) aNONradio. I say "I suspect" there because

I didn't see the toot itself (which is now lost to time), but other

people whose judgement I totally trust did and nobody seems to think

suspension was warranted. I then went on to learn of other recent

events of a similar nature. This sort of thing is such an obvious

betrayal of community trust and abuse of authority that I don't think

I even need to spend time talking about it.

The great thing about the fediverse is that instance admins hold very

little essential power over you. When Cat got banned, I decided I

couldn't in good conscience continue using SDF's Mastodon instance.

So, I opened a new account at tilde.zone, and followed most of the

same people I was following via mastodon.sdf.org. After a few

reminder notices for people who missed my first post, I will close

the mastodon.sdf.org account and that will be it. Nobody at SDF had

any power to stop this. If they were really spiteful, they could

sever federation between tilde.zone and mastodon.sdf.org so I couldn't

keep following my SDF friends, but that would affect many people other

than me and probably cause a bit of an uproar, so basically there was

nothing they could do. I can't overstate how fantastic this is.

With federated protocols, you never have to plead with a crooked admin

to get them to reverse a ban or change their ways, you never have to

grit your teeth and endure mistreatment, you just say "Fuck this, I'm

leaving" and you walk away without looking back. This is freedom.

After SDF had been badly and consistently mishandling their gopher

hosting for a while, I left and setup circumlunar.space so I could

phlog my way over there (I was in good company - this year Auzymoto,

Cat, Jynx, Tomasino and maybe more all setup their own gopher servers

and left SDF's, or relegated it to backup status). I kept using other

SDF services, because they worked, at least well enough for me.

Now I've replaced another SDF service, and this time it's not due to

technical problems, but social ones. To be blunt, the people in power

at SDF are not good people. I think a lot of people have known this,

or expected it, for some time. We just kind of put up with it because

the other users typically are good people. SDF's a funny place, I

think many users have a kind of Stockholm syndrome thing going on.

Imagine you're in a prison, where the facilities are poorly kept, the

food is awful and the guards can be assholes. But your fellow inmates

are mostly really smart, interesting kind people, and the prison has a

really good library and cool classes you can take instead of forced

labour. It's not exactly a good place to be and you'd sure as hell

like some changes made, but you're not exactly itching to escape at

the first chance you get. Maybe this isn't a good comparison, I

dunno.

SDF talks a lot of talk about being non-commercial and respecting your

privacy, and hats off to them, that's true and it's really, really a

good way to be. I have never heard even a wild rumor about SDF

selling user data or tracking people across the web. I straight up

don't believe that happens and, once more, hats off. But that's where

the non-commercial warm and fuzzies end. An SDF user has exactly the

same relationship to the administration there that a paying customer

has to an evil faceless megacorp. The admins will add shit, remove

shit, and break shit for no good reason, without warning or

explanation, will never back down from a change and if you complain or

suggest alternatives, the best you are likely to get is to be told to

shut up and update the community-maintained documentation to reflect

the new enforced reality. If you make too much of a fuss, they'll ban

your ass. If you make a toot pointing out that they are doing this,

that it's wrong, and that you're leaving their Mastodon server, they

will, I shit you not, fave and boost that toot - actively boasting to

their other users "Look how we're upsetting our users by being

assholes!". It's, frankly, twisted. Literally nobody actually

believes that this is the way digital communities should be run.

If things are so damn bad, why am I only walking away from SDF's

gopher and Mastodon servics instead of forsaking the whole fortress?

That would probably be the right thing to do, and I guess I'd like to,

but not every aspect of my SDF life is as easy to walk away from as

the Masto instance.

Some are, at least in principle. I use their email service, and their

XMPP service. Those are both federated protocols, with the same

fundamental walk-away-ability as Mastodon or OStatus. The XMPP server

would probably be easy to replace, and I probably will do so, I just

haven't rushed out to do it because I use it so infrequently that it's

not a huge priority. As for email, well. Free email has a long

standing and very tight association with the surveillance marketing

complex. Getting free or very cheap email with an assurance that

your email text is not being data mined is actually not very easy. In

light of the Snowden revelations, a lot of new pro-privacy email

providers have been popping up and getting media attention, but after

a little bit of research I've come to learn that many of these aren't

actually email providers after all, but "email" providers. They offer

you some kind of secure messaging service which has compatibility

gateways so that real email can get in and out, letting you talk to

your friends at gmail, but service-internal messages are a totally

different story. Which is not necessarily problematic, but the

problem is that these services provide the bare minimum of

compatibility to let you send and receive email to/from outside their

system. If you want to access your mail via IMAP or POP with a

standard client, you are straight out of luck. In the best case, you

can pay extra money to use a proprietary software gateway, if your

platform is supported. This is a deal breaker for me. I honestly

believe many of these systems were setup this way with the best of

intentions, for the sake of highly secure storage and transit, but

it's still a deal breaker for me. It's good old fashioned vendor

lock-in, for a good cause. You can't walk away from one of these

systems and take all your stuff with you.

Other SDF services are not so easily replacable. BBOARD and COM are

unique features of SDF, and if I left the SDF I'd be leaving those for

good. I am, of course, also an aNONradio DJ. I could move my show to

some other internet radio station, I'm sure, although this might mean

losing listeners, not that I have all that many. To be honest, I

don't place a lot of value on BBOARD, it's very low traffic given how

many users SDF has, and at least 50% of that traffic is people asking

for help with stuff that's broken. But COM and aNONradio are special

to me, listening to Intergalactic Wasabi Mix and chatting with

snowdusk and the other listeners in COM was what really drew me into

SDF in the first place. I want to remain a part of that community.

Since I'm using the tilde.zone Mastodon instance now, why not get a

shell account at one of the tildeverse.org-affiliated public access

unix servers, like tilde.team? I've thought about it. But this very

struggle I'm going through with SDF, having to replace a whole bunch

of services because just one of them is being so badly run, has

underscored for me the importance of not putting all your eggs in one

basket. The tilde.team folk, for example, seem like good folk. And I

could join them, get an email and maybe an XMPP (do they do that?),

migrate my aNONradio show to tilderadio and wash my hands of SDF for

good. But then if tilde.team did anything I really disagreed with,

five or ten years from now, I'd be in exactly the same boat. I think

it's best to get your services from multiple independent sources. If

one source turns out to be a bad actor, you can do the right thing and

walk away with a minimum of fuss (assuming you limit yourself to

services compatible with this). The ideal form of this practice is

"one service per provider", so using a tildeverse Mastodon instance

would rule out using a tildeverse solution for anything else. I may

end up utilising a slightly more relaxed version of this rule in the

form of "not too many services per provider", we'll see.

All of this has left me thinking quite a lot about the public access

unix sphere and it's future. I don't think SDF is going away anytime

soon, despite its myriad problems which have been around for years.

For every grumpy long-time user like myself who walks away, several

impressionable newcomers will sign up, lured by the name recognition

and sense of history. But for me, personally, I think, or at least

hope, that SDF will become less and less important. The idea of one

huge service provider serving tens of thousands of people feels like

something from the past - and not in a good way. We've seen a lot

of the problems that come from that model since 2010 or thereabouts.

Usually in a commercial setting, true, but SDF is the existence

proof that being non-commercial is not a cure-all for those problems.

While there is a lot of political baggage that goes along with

Mastodon that I don't care for at all, I take a lot of inspiration

from Mastodon, or at least from the Mastodon instances which, in my

opinion, do their job well. A large number of small or medium

(really, of "just large enough") communities which interact as equals,

with individual mobility between communities, is a fantastic model

for digital social interaction. Individual megalomaniacal admins can

only ever exercise control over a small part of the network, and when

they do, their users can flee. Small community sizes mean that

everybody knows (maybe almost) everybody else. If an admin mistreats

one user in a small community, it's a lot more visible. A lot of

other users know and trust that user that got pushed around, and it

can't get as easily buried or ignored. SDF is so large and has so

many non-overlapping sub-communities, plenty of users have probably

never even heard of Cat.

There's no reason public access unix systems can't be run more like

Mastodon. I think the tildeverse.org model is a great step in that

direction. A (small for now) number of participating tilde servers

("tilde" is basically a kind of community-owned brand name that some

public access servers choose to apply. It's a new-fangled thing,

relative to SDF, Grex, etc., but it's fundemantally the same kind of

thing) have joined a kind of collective organisation that coordinates

activity between those servers (not in a top-down kind of way, this is

all voluntary). The most concrete example of this is an IRC network.

There are IRC servers running on tilde.town, tilde.team and

yourtilde.com, and any shell user of any of those systems can just

connect their IRC client to "localhost". But content in a channel

on any one server's IRC server is also seen in the corresponding

channel on the other severs. This is amazing! It's like SDF users

being able to chat to Grex users, while logged into their respective

shell systems, without relying on any third parties other than SDF and

Grex, without the sysadmins of those systems allowing their users to

make outgoing IRC connections to arbitrary hosts. This approach

breaks, to some extent, the walled garden problem of public access

unix which I wrote about over a year ago[1]. I'm not that big of an

IRC user, but I think this approach is nothing short of excellent.

This idea could, obviously, be extended. One can, for example,

imagine a small NNTP network, permitting a kind of shared Usenet

between trusted shell systems. These kind of not-really-public,

not-really-closed, definitely decentralised approaches seem, to me, to

really hit a kind of sweet spot where they are less susceptible to a

lot of the problems associated with totally open public systems (spam,

unaccountability of users, Eternal September) and with walled gardens

(lock-in, non-scalability, all-powerful admins).

If there's anything else I have to say about how public access unix

systems should be run, it's this. One: use free software. SDF fails

in this regard, and it's a bizarre paradox. 90% of the users are free

software enthusiasts, and we all happily use proprietary non-standard

things like COM and BBOARD. It can, and should, be otherwise. I'm

(slowly) trying to make the Zaibatsu a model of how this can be done -

check out the gopher frontend to our git repos[2]! Two: let your

users help. One of SDF's biggest problems is that the user to admin

ratio results in a crippling workload for the people in charge, which

leads to things falling apart. SDF is full of dedicated and

responsible people who've been there for years and would love to help

lighten the load, but there is just no interest in this from on top,

as far as I can tell. Done properly, this doesn't just lighten the

load, it improves response time by making sure that the people with

the power to fix problems are those who are affected by them! Nobody

wants SDF's gopher server to run smoothly more than the phloggers, and

nobody wants aNONradio to run smoothly more than the DJs. But those

people - even the ones who have been contributing for years and years,

sometimes not just with their time and content but their money too -

have no more control over those systems than somebody who just signed

up yesterday. Long serving, reliable generators of high quality

content are a digital community's most valuable asset. They should be

identified and given just enough power to help out with the stuff they

need to continue being an asset. This can of course be done very

gradually, very slowly, to minimise risk.

If you've read this far, I thank you. If you are remotely interested

in exchanging ideas about the future of public access unix, or in

putting these ideas into practice, please reach out to me. I am

considering making circumlunar.space into a test bed for some of these

ideas, after consulting with the sundog community. Because, you know,

that's what good admins do.

[1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/two-walls-good-four-walls-bad.txt

[2] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/software