Bitreich

   { Researching this on-the-go, send me corrections, thanks. ~drummyfish }

   Bitreich is a small, obscure underground group/movement of programmers who
   greatly value [1]minimalism/[2]simplicity, oppose the [3]evil and
   degeneration of [4]modern mainstream technology and aim for making the
   world a better place mainly through simpler [5]technology. They seem to
   belong to the cluster of "minimalist programmer groups", i.e. they are
   similar to [6]suckless (which in their manifesto they see as a failed
   project), [7]reactionary software and our very own [8]LRS, sharing many
   values such as [9]minimalism, [10]Unix philosophy, preference and love of
   the [11]C language, carrying on some of the [12]hacker culture heritage,
   though of course they also have their own specifics that will make them
   different and even disagreeing with us and others on occasion, e.g. on
   [13]copyleft (unlike us, they seem to greatly prefer the [14]GPL),
   terminology (yeah, they seems to prefer "[15]open source") and probably
   also things like [16]privacy (though the craze doesn't seem to go too far,
   many have listed their real names and addresses) etc.

   According to the gopherhole Bitreich started on 17.8.2016 -- the founder
   (or at least one of them?) seems to be 20h (Christoph Lohmann according to
   the user profile), a guy formerly active in [17]suckless (can be found on
   their website), who even gave an interview about Bitreich to some
   radio/magazine/whatever. It seems Bitreich originated in Germany. As of
   2023 they list 12 official member profiles (the number of lurker followers
   will of course be a much high number, there seem to be even bitreich
   subcommunities in other countries such as Italy). They are mostly present
   on [18]gopher (gopher://bitreich.org), which they greatly promote, and
   [19]IRC (ircs://irc.bitreich.org:6697/#bitreich-en). There are also
   [20]Tor hidden services etc.; their website at bitreich.org seems to be
   purposefully broken in protest of the [21]web horror.

   Some of their ideas and philosophy seems to be very based, e.g. preference
   of KISS/older protocols (gopher, ftp, IRC, ...), "users are programmers"
   (opposing division into users as consumers and developers as overlords),
   "bug reports are [22]patches", "programs can be [23]finished" etc.

   Bitreich is also about humor and [24]fun (sometimes so much so that it's
   not clear if something is a joke or serious stuff -- maybe because it's
   partly both). They invented [25]analgram, an authentication method based
   on analprints (alternative to fingerprint authentication). They put a
   snapshot of their source code into an actual Arctic vault in Greenland, to
   be preserved for millennia. Often there appear parodies of whatever is
   currently hyping in the mainstream, e.g. [26]NFTs, "big data", [27]AI,
   [28]blockchain etc. { There's also some stuff going on with [29]memes and
   cooking recipes but TBH I didn't get it. ~drummyfish }

   Some interesting projects they do:

     * Bitreichcon: annual conference, running since 2017. Their slides can
       be downloaded in plain text.
     * Bitreich radio
     * Day Of The GrParazyd: point and click adventure [30]game. { Didn't
       even take a look at this yet, sorry, no idea what it really is :D
       ~drummyfish }
     * The Gopher Lawn: directory/index of gopherspace, categorizing
       gopherhole links.
     * The Gopher Times: a very cool printable magazine (in both [31]pdf and
       [32]plain text), git clone git://bitreich.org/tgtimes.
     * A number of smaller utilities/programs and parody stuff (see their
       gopherhole).
     * Keeping infrastructure to host stuff they see as valuable.
     * ...

See Also

     * [33]suckless
     * [34]reactionary software
     * [35]less retarded software
     * [36]KISS

Links:
1. minimalism.md
2. simplicity.md
3. evil.md
4. modern.md
5. tech.md
6. suckless.md
7. reactionary_software.md
8. lrs.md
9. minimalism.md
10. unix_philosophy.md
11. c.md
12. hacking.md
13. copyleft.md
14. gpl.md
15. open_source.md
16. privacy.md
17. suckless.md
18. gopher.md
19. irc.md
20. tor.md
21. web.md
22. patch.md
23. finished.md
24. fun.md
25. analgram.md
26. nft.md
27. ai.md
28. blockchain.md
29. meme.md
30. game.md
31. pdf.md
32. txt.md
33. suckless.md
34. reactionary_software.md
35. lrs.md
36. kiss.md