So much cool stuff

Greetings, gopherverse! I've been really busy for the past few weeks,

which is why I've not phlogged recently. This has actually been

• really* difficult because there is just so much cool stuff happening

in gopherspace and the blossoming indie-pubnixspace (which really

needs a name!), and so much fascinating meta-discussion about that

cool stuff. I also feel really bad that so many of the new Zaibatsu

phloggers have been churning out really high quality, topical content

that I've not had the time to respond to yet (rest assured, I'm

reading!). I'm hoping I can catch up a bit this weekend, but I've

been spurred to write something briefish tonight in response to some

recent happenings/posts.

First of all, let me quickly say that the launch of cosmic.voyage by

Tomasino[1] and announcement of tilde.tel by Cat[2] in response to my

"Hey you, host something"[3] have exceeded in every way my

expectations of what would come from that post. I am so excited

about these projects. Thanks and kudos to Tomasino and Cat both.

Honestly, I feel like I'm hanging out in the coolest part of the

entire internet right now. This is awesome.

Jynx[4] and Tomasino[5] wrote some stuff about federated pubnix and,

honestly, it kind of felt like they'd been rummaging in my brain.

I've thought, and written, about a lot of the ideas they mentioned in

recent weeks, but in scattered places - emails to people, BBS posts at

the Zaibatsu, random Mastodon posts. But I haven't done a very good

job of posting clearly thought out ideas in easy to find places, like

my phlog.

I want to sieze on one particular thing Tomasino said, about getting

the local mail on cosmic.voyage to work nicely with some Tildeverse

servers but not the wider world.

I floated precisely this idea on the Zaibatsu BBS a few weeks ago,

after slugmax and I had been talking about how to get mail working

between the Zaibatsu and the Republic which will be launched soon as

the second "colony" in the Circumlunar Universe. It turns out it's

quite easy indeed to configure Postfix to only allow mail in/out

from/to a whitelist of domains, and of course you can use your

filewall to back this up by limiting SMTP connections to the

corresponding servers. So I figured, why not also allow interchange

with say, SDF, Grex and Tildeverse servers? These places are very

unlikely to be a source of spam, and if there is any trouble, the

admins of these places are likely pretty easy to get in touch with.

Nobody was actively opposed to this idea, but most people were, I

guess, uninterested, because they already have "real" email addresses

which work everywhere. I'm thinking now of doing it anyway, just to

test the idea and the config. Tomasino, I'm happy to experiment

setting this up between the Zaibatsu and cosmic.voyage if you like,

just drop me a line.

I think this idea extends to lots of things besides email. Outgoing

SSH is one. Zaibatsu users can SSH to Grex and to MetaARPA/ARPA-only

SDF servers, and that's it (though I've made it clear people can ask

for other places to be whitelisted in the BBS's REQUESTS board!).

IRC should also be straightforward. I would love to experiment

with NNTP.

I've started to think of this idea as something like recreating or

reenacting the very early internet, back when all the machines online

were at universities or government/military research centers, and

there were so few an admin could maintain a routing table by hand,

looking at the hand-drawn network diagram pinned up on their wall;

where all the admins probably had all the other admins' phone numbers

in their address book. Something like one dozen smallish, independent

pubnix servers could support several hundred users easily, while still

being a small enough set that people could configure their firewall

whitelist by hand without it being super impractical. By not allowing

incoming connections from the outside world, it's extremely likely that

there would be no, or very very little, spam, advertising or general

abuse. Users also couldn't get up to that much mischief, as they

couldn't e.g. send spam to anywhere in the outside world. Just a cozy

little network of unix geeks, voluntarily cutting themselves off from

the outside world to do things their own way. Not quite a walled

garden in the traditional sense, because the participating servers are

independent and the network is open-ended. New ones can be brought in

if they're going to play nice. If any server stops playing nice, the

others can choose to remove it from their whitelists. This seems

like a fantastic way for a decentralised network of shell providers to

function. I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20181124-cosmic-voyage

[2] gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20181128.txt

[3] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/hey-you-host-something.txt

[4] gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20181128.post

[5] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20181128-re-jynx-so-much-cool-stuff-going-on