A new circumlunar colony
------------------------

I'm a little late making this announcement, but as of a few days
ago, for the first time in approximately two years (since the launch
of the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic sometime in
late 2018), a new circumlunar colony was launched.  The Mare Crisium
Soviet Socialist Regency (or "the Soviet" for short) is a public
access OpenBSD server offering shell accounts, Gopher hosting and
Gemini hosting to a maximum of 48 users.  The Soviet will be fully
federated with the existing Zaibatsu (32 user cap) and Republic
(64 user cap) colonies via email, our IRC network and our home-grown
BBS system (where posts are synchronised between servers via regular
cron jobs using rsync over ssh), bringing the total capacity of the
decentralised, text-based circumlunar community up to 144 sundogs.
This extra capacity comes just in time, with the Republic having
recently hit its user cap for the first time in its history.
You can read more at the Soviet itself[1], the announcement phlog
post by Soviet admin Katolaz[2], and the announcement phlog post by
Republic admin Slugmax[3].

I'm very excited by this development!  The explosion of interest in
Gemini this year has kind of distracted me from Circumlunar Space,
but I am very keen to start pushing the balance back in the other
direction in 2021.  I still think the federated pubnix model with
deliberately constrained userbases is a beautiful thing, ticking
so many important boxes with respect to decentralisation, privacy,
collective governance, genuine community building, DIY-ability,
and doing online socialisation and discourse at a human scale and
with an appropriate balance between ingroup-outgroup accessibility.

I am hoping that there will be a lot more happening in Circumlunar
Space in the coming year, and not just because of new members
arriving to the Soviet.  In the early days of the Zaibatsu, a lot
of great software development happened in a fairly short time,
with projects targetting the needs of pubnix communities.  This has
since slowed down a lot, in fact pretty much to a stand still,
in part because our immediate needs were met, but also because our
git hosting and workflow were never really smoothly transitioned to
something which put Zaibatsu and Republic users on equal footing
once we became more than a single server.  We're talking about
ways to address this now, and I look forward to something concrete
coming out of it and a possible second iteration of experimenting
with cmccabe's "pubnixes as hackerspaces" concept.

I'd like to close this post with a big "thank you" to my fellow
circumlunar colony admins Slugmax and Katolaz for making this
wonderful community possible, and to pubnix admins everywhere for
helping to maintain and grow the most exciting part of the internet.
Cheers!

[1] gopher://soviet.circumlunar.space:70/1/
[2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~katolaz/phlog/20201216_soviet.txt
[3] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~slugmax/phlog/2020-12-16-a-new-circumlunar-colony-the-soviet

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