Wither pubnixes? There has been a lot of activity recently in the small world of public access Unix systems (for now, I'll call them pubnixes), especially if that term includes things like tilde servers. SDF has crossed the long uncertain bridge of sysadmin change of guard. tilde.town has been active for long enough to have developed its own culture and history. tilde.team has gone from 1 or less login a day back in May when I first found it to 60 distinct users over the past three days (1577 actual logins). Several other tildes have sprouted up, and even more systems are gaining traction fast; last but not least, circumlunar.space, as an example. Where do you think all this activity is heading? What do you think this unique online space could or should look like in the next year or so? I tried to piece together some of the history of pubnixes a while back (currently just linked on my sdf.org website [1]), but I have the feeling a new era of these systems is just getting started. One trend I am interested in watching is in what I'll call micro-pubnixes, small shell servers that people are running off of raspberry pi's in their homes. sloum [2] is running one, and I believe the Red Consensus [3] is running on a pi as well. This reminds me of a blog post by Paul Ford about a year ago, called Decentralize It! [4]. I can't quite picture what would be the outcome of many more people diving into the sysadmin role and setting up their own home-served micro pubnix. If collaborations get built out of this, and an ecosystem of supporting software and federated communiations tools develops, it could be really exciting. But that is just one possible trend. Another possibility is that everyone loses interest and the whole thing dissipates. Or something else entirely. What do you think? I posted this same text on gboard at grex.org. Grex is another pubnix, and one that has been around for a long time. It is reaching a point where a handful of its remaining users are asking "what's next?". So if you would like to give your thoughts about "whither pubnixes", or about the future of grex.org itself, or if you just need an excuse to check out Grex, head on over. You'll probably find some familiar faces. [1] https://cmccabe.sdf.org/ [2] gopher://colorfield.space:70/ [3] gopher://consensus.circumlunar.space/1/ [4] https://postlight.com/trackchanges/decentralize-it