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