I haven't updated my SDF phlog in quite a while, so I thought I'd make a post describing a
project I've been working on recently.
In the spirit of all the public access *nix servers that have recently arisen, I set up my own
micro "pubnix" at rawtext.club. I've never been a big IRC user, and although I love gopher, I have
to push myself to update my own phlog(s). But I really enjoy interacting with other *nix
enthusiasts in the form of collaborative development projects. So I designed rawtext.club to
minimize high-speed chatting (i.e. no IRC) and emphasize *nix skill-building through socializing in
the form of collaborative projects.
Yes, I did install a gopher server (gophernicus) and a chat application (anyone know "party" from
Grex?), but the experimental part of the rawtext.club project is to encourage users to share and
learn with each other through collaborative software development. While this may sound fairly
narrow at first, I take a broad view of software development. It includes not only coding but,
importantly, critical feedback from users. And of course, general socializing is not
discouraged, and is actually common in the "party" chat.
Another experimental aspect of rawtext.club is something I see increasingly common in the pubnix
space. That is, aiming for a super low-resource system. rawtext.club is currently running on
the smallest VPS I could find*. You can see similar low-resource pubnixes at solderpunk's
Zaibatsu (VPS) and sloum's colorfield.space (Raspberry Pi Zero). The tight resource budget
presents interesting sysadmin challenges and also encourages user/developers to think about
light-weight programs. Both challenges are a sort of puzzle to be solved and are part of the fun
(although I'll willingly admit that I may be an outlier in calling this "fun").
Some existing development projects include linkulator, a shell-based link aggregator; Planet
Shlog, a shell blog writer/aggregator; and sl, a multi-user, vertical "space launch" version of
the classic "steam locomotive" UNIX prank. Hopefully there is a lot more to come (maybe a
phlogosphere phloggregator?), and you're encouraged to join if you're also wierd enough to find
this fun.
Given that I'm posting this on an SDF-based phlog, I think it is important to point one thing out
for rawtext.club as well as many of the other pubnixes these days: all these new pubnixes should
not be thought of as competitors to each other. Rather, they are an example of the healthy
revival and proliferation of the non-commercial internet. With accolades to smj and the current
SDF staff, I strongly believe the majority of this is occuring because of SDF's inspiration. But
importantly, there is a large fleet of users who aren't jumping ship from SDF, but rather
expanding to include drop-ins at other systems as well.
I'm hoping that anyone who shares my bizarre sense of fun will drop in to rawtext.club too --
and, of course, that's part of the experiment.
* I also have plans to run a subdomain off of a Raspberry Pi using a human-powered gravity battery,
but that is another story entirely...
