Assorted replies and acknowledgements
-------------------------------------
The thread about minimalism has spread beyond the confines of the SDF and been
picked up by Ze Libertine Gamer, who has written on similar things before. You
should check out his contribution[0]. Sorry to hear about your bike seat, ZLG!
Some time ago tfurrows replied[1] to my post about my ambulance fantasies, and I
totally missed it at the time! Sorry, tfurrows! Even if you never watched the
original BladeRunner, you still deserve better than that. Tfurrows wrote, of
me, "If I can venture to speak for him, I'd say that means he cares more deeply
about the morality of his actions that the actual actions themselves". I'm not
sure if I agree about the morality of my actions *more* than the actions
themselves - I don't think I'd be particularly happy doing mindless and
repetitive manual labour for minimum wage if the labour was somehow in aid of
something that I genuinely believed was making the world a better place for
everyone (although who knows, maybe I would). But I definitely care about it to
some extent, and I think more than most, but a lot of people may think that. I
think I focussed in on that because, right now, I'm much more comfortable on the
"job is interesting and challenging and enjoyable and pays enough" axis than I
am on the "makes me feel like I am making a positive change in the world and
genuinely earning my keep" axis. Ideally I'd like to maximise both, but that's
a big ask.
Tfurrows went on to ask "but I wonder what job he would fantasize about if
morality wasn't really an issue". Fair question. I am relatively certain that
I really should have become some kind of engineer, either software, computer or
electronic. I know through my hobby work, and through the programming that I do
as a part of my dayjob, that the kind of technical problem solving that crops up
when designing complex systems engrosses me like nothing else on Earth. It's
really easy for me to slip into a mindset where I am intensely focussed on
something and the nothing else matters. Possibly this is not a healthy state to
exist in all the time, but I know that if I'm allowed to sit in that state
uninterrupted and just figure stuff out, I am incredibly content. So perhaps my
fantasy job in that sense would be some kind of engineering gig, but (since it's
a fantasy) one where the different issues I'm trying to trade off against
(because engineering is all about trade offs) are the ones *I* care about, where
profit margin is not more important as, say, autonomy, environmental
sustainability, device lifetime or reparability, software freedom, etc.
Hobbsc wrote recently about "the apparent decline of the SDF"[2]. This is
something I think about quite a lot. I *like* the SDF, I'm having a good time
being here and meeting lots of great like-minded people. I haven't been here
long enough to know if it's worse now than it was in the past, but speaking
about the present, well, to be blunt, anybody who is genuinely satisfied with
the place as it is run now has ludicrously low standards.
It's super apparent to anybody who pays attention to bboard that SDF has grown
too big for one person to effectively administer it. This is not a sleight
against smj - he's just one dude, he has 24 hours in a day like the rest of us
and no doubt a lot of other stuff going on his life. SDF is beyond the
ability of *any* one person to administer solo unless they're paid to work on it
full time. The problem is that the place is being *allowed* to remain run by
one person. Plenty of trusted users, including MetaARPA folk who have been here
for many years, have offered to help out, and my understanding is that this
request always falls on deaf ears. I honestly wonder what would happen if smj
got hit by a bus. I worry it wouldn't be good.
Hobbsc points out "It's probably important to remember that SDF is mostly a
hobbyist system and it is run by donations". Sure. I do not expect commercial
grade quality of sevice, 99.99% uptime, response to my queries within the hour.
My gripe is that this place doesn't feel like it's being run by a dedicated
group of volunteer hobbyists trying their best to get as close to that standard
as they reasonably can but falling short because, hey, they are, in fact,
volunteer hoobyists with families and day jobs. It feels instead like a place
that is just barely limping along, with a very strong culture of "if you don't
like it, shut up and pay smj more", and no obvious non-financial avenue for
interested community members to help make it better. Sure, it's better than
nothing, but is it the best we can do? Is it the kind of Fortress we want?
Hobbsc also pointed out in an earlier post[3] (his contribution to the
asceticism/minimalism/sustainability thread) that plenty of core aspects of SDF
(including bboard and com) are closed source. I was surprised when I first
learned this, and continue to be surprised that most people are apparently okay
with this. It seems pretty likely to me that most people using SDF would have a
strong preference for these things to be open. I don't feel like the
implementation of SDF necessary aligns with the values that most of its member's
hold.
On the SDF Mastodon instance, users @maiki and @satchmoz have been having very
interesting conversations over the past few days about "federated unix servers",
which is something else I've thought about, especially given the rapid increase
in popularity and deployment of Mastodon. I really think it would be fantastic
if the niche currently served by SDF, Grex and a small handful of other systems
nobody has heard of were replaced by a wide network of such systems, each with
relatively small userbases, so that they could be easily administered by
individuals, which had some facility for discovering one another and exchanging
information (via UUCP?). I'm aware of the tilde club experiment which tried to
get something like this happening. I understand most of them have died off. I
don't know to what extent there was ever a standardised "tilde platform" behind
this or if each tilde host was just something an individual admin setup as they
liked. If the latter, I wonder how much more success we would see with the
former, if the barrier to entry was lower (just download and deploy the latest
version of the "fednix" platform, or whatever. This model has worked *very*
well for Mastodon, I wonder if it can be extended to public access unix?
Obviously this would not replace SDF entirely, most of these instances are not
going to come with the storage facilities of the metaarray, or the bandwidth
necessary to run an internet radio station like Anonradio. But they could
surely help spread *some* of the load, especially everything to do with plain
text (mail, gopher, basic http, IRC, etc....).
[0]
gopher://zelibertinegamer.me:70/0/phlog/2017-10-26_0005.txt
[1]
gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/aep_shaman.txt
[2]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/hobbsc/phlog/2017102902.org
[3]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/hobbsc/phlog/20171029.org
