I am tinkering with the idea of a small pubnix.
These are some of my initial ideas about the
project, and I'll also keep updating
lucid.observer on both http and gopher.
I've enjoy deploying servers in the past, mostly
on Digital Ocean or different VPS providers, as
well as locally, for small business wiki and
communication.
I also like the hardware part of it. The
infrastructure of my mini server forest at
home, from openWrt main hub to the web and
gopher server, media server etc...
The idea behind lucid.observer is 2 fold.
THE IDEOLOGICAL FOLD
While reading William Burroughs view of a nation,
it made me realized that nations are often too
wide to empower everyone. A nation has to become
quite standardized to a precise behaviour,
anything or anyone movig away from that standard
way of living become marginalized. So a nation
becomes simply an idea of a normalized way of
life, where a lot of people fall on the way side.
Now I am not on board with a lot of what Burroughs
talk about, his view on gender and family. But
this concept of smaller community, smaller tribes
which can be highly benificial for the personal
well being and growth of its members has resurface
many times in my past reading.
How small pubnix might be a platform to create
a small community, a small tribe. The platform
would be used for communication, knowledge
sharing, creativity and gathering and maybe to
organize online of offline events or skill
sharing sessions.
Of course I take a lot of inspiration from SDF
and the the tilde culture. The tribe that is
created around aNONradio, has been the center
of my online life for the last few months,
chatting on com, broadcasting on anonradio,
using mail and bboard. That's already plenty
for me! Like a friend of mine said, I'd rather
have 4 quarter than 100 cents, it's really the
quality of my online experience that is important,
not the quanitity.
So in order to create a tribe, I'm writing a
manifesto. An overview of what the concept is about
and where we are going as a culture. Here is what
I believe in, if you feel the call, lets discuss
about it!
Mass movement are often fuelled by the frustration to attain
something else, while the energy of a small communities focuses
on the well being of its members.
In a review of Eric Hoffer, "True Believer: Thoughts
on nature of mass movements"
https://robkhenderson.com
"Community is a safeguard against frustration. Hoffer
suggest that those who see themselves as a part of a
close-knit group are less likely to be attracted to
mass movements. The sense of accountability that comes
from being part of a community and the reciprocal actions
required to sustain membership counters the
urge to lose oneself in a larger collective identity."
I personally find a lot of inspiration in this book,
the review by Rob Henderson is also quite powerful
(and a lot shorter!)
THE TECHNICAL FOLD
There is something about low powered servers
that are easy to transport, fix, setup and
power which uses very simple technologies.
A modular system, that could be hooked to
a solar powered battery, or a ham radio to
do radio to networking for instance.
A server that can fit in a pocket, which can be
duplicated easily, if a medium is failling.
This idea of offline first, text first computing
which I wrote about here:
But applied to a server which could connect a community.
The users could connect in different ways, on very
'thin' clients, which could sync quickly an easily.
A knowledge bank or a wiki to store knowledge or
conversation.
All this, mixed with the concept of collapse and
permacomputing in an healthy, lets practice
keeping a system to the bare minimum and see
how practical and usable it can be.
A centralized mini server for online tribe making
wihch can be used for communication, knowledge
and skill sharing. With a very small techological
footprint, and made for people who wants to
de-digitized their life, while still benefiting
from a minimal ammount of technology.
So the goal is to keep it as simple to use and
maintain with a strong value for the user.
We'll see how far it gets, but the first
iteration should come online shortly!
The initial page for lucid.observer is already
up as well as the gopher, on a raspberry pi,
but I'm planing to move the whole server on it's
own raspberry pi.
Still debating on the OS of choice, after trying a
few BSD I ended up on NetBSD but haven't had good
feedback on it's usefulness on rpi or sdcard faillures.
More to come!
