On SDF, and the future of public access unix
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There has been a little bit of drama on the Mastodon SDF instance
recently. Well, that's probably an exaggeration, the happenings seem
to have been totally ignored by 95% of the instance, but whatever.
Well-known and well-loved phlogger and aNONradio DJ Cat had his
Mastodon account suspended in retaliation for making a toot outlining
problems with (I suspect) aNONradio. I say "I suspect" there because
I didn't see the toot itself (which is now lost to time), but other
people whose judgement I totally trust did and nobody seems to think
suspension was warranted. I then went on to learn of other recent
events of a similar nature. This sort of thing is such an obvious
betrayal of community trust and abuse of authority that I don't think
I even need to spend time talking about it.
The great thing about the fediverse is that instance admins hold very
little essential power over you. When Cat got banned, I decided I
couldn't in good conscience continue using SDF's Mastodon instance.
So, I opened a new account at tilde.zone, and followed most of the
same people I was following via mastodon.sdf.org. After a few
reminder notices for people who missed my first post, I will close
the mastodon.sdf.org account and that will be it. Nobody at SDF had
any power to stop this. If they were *really* spiteful, they could
sever federation between tilde.zone and mastodon.sdf.org so I couldn't
keep following my SDF friends, but that would affect many people other
than me and probably cause a bit of an uproar, so basically there was
nothing they could do. I can't overstate how fantastic this is.
With federated protocols, you never have to plead with a crooked admin
to get them to reverse a ban or change their ways, you never have to
grit your teeth and endure mistreatment, you just say "Fuck this, I'm
leaving" and you walk away without looking back. This is freedom.
After SDF had been badly and consistently mishandling their gopher
hosting for a while, I left and setup circumlunar.space so I could
phlog my way over there (I was in good company - this year Auzymoto,
Cat, Jynx, Tomasino and maybe more all setup their own gopher servers
and left SDF's, or relegated it to backup status). I kept using other
SDF services, because they worked, at least well enough for me.
Now I've replaced another SDF service, and this time it's not due to
technical problems, but social ones. To be blunt, the people in power
at SDF are not good people. I think a lot of people have known this,
or expected it, for some time. We just kind of put up with it because
the other users typically *are* good people. SDF's a funny place, I
think many users have a kind of Stockholm syndrome thing going on.
Imagine you're in a prison, where the facilities are poorly kept, the
food is awful and the guards can be assholes. But your fellow inmates
are mostly really smart, interesting kind people, and the prison has a
really good library and cool classes you can take instead of forced
labour. It's not exactly a good place to be and you'd sure as hell
like some changes made, but you're not exactly itching to escape at
the first chance you get. Maybe this isn't a good comparison, I
dunno.
SDF talks a lot of talk about being non-commercial and respecting your
privacy, and hats off to them, that's true and it's really, really a
good way to be. I have never heard even a wild rumor about SDF
selling user data or tracking people across the web. I straight up
don't believe that happens and, once more, hats off. But that's where
the non-commercial warm and fuzzies end. An SDF user has exactly the
same relationship to the administration there that a paying customer
has to an evil faceless megacorp. The admins will add shit, remove
shit, and break shit for no good reason, without warning or
explanation, will never back down from a change and if you complain or
suggest alternatives, the best you are likely to get is to be told to
shut up and update the community-maintained documentation to reflect
the new enforced reality. If you make too much of a fuss, they'll ban
your ass. If you make a toot pointing out that they are doing this,
that it's wrong, and that you're leaving their Mastodon server, they
will, I shit you not, fave and boost that toot - actively boasting to
their other users "Look how we're upsetting our users by being
assholes!". It's, frankly, twisted. Literally nobody actually
believes that this is the way digital communities *should* be run.
If things are so damn bad, why am I only walking away from SDF's
gopher and Mastodon servics instead of forsaking the whole fortress?
That would probably be the right thing to do, and I guess I'd like to,
but not every aspect of my SDF life is as easy to walk away from as
the Masto instance.
Some are, at least in principle. I use their email service, and their
XMPP service. Those are both federated protocols, with the same
fundamental walk-away-ability as Mastodon or OStatus. The XMPP server
would probably be easy to replace, and I probably will do so, I just
haven't rushed out to do it because I use it so infrequently that it's
not a huge priority. As for email, well. Free email has a long
standing and very tight association with the surveillance marketing
complex. Getting free or very cheap email *with* an assurance that
your email text is not being data mined is actually not very easy. In
light of the Snowden revelations, a lot of new pro-privacy email
providers have been popping up and getting media attention, but after
a little bit of research I've come to learn that many of these aren't
actually email providers after all, but "email" providers. They offer
you some kind of secure messaging service which has compatibility
gateways so that *real* email can get in and out, letting you talk to
your friends at gmail, but service-internal messages are a totally
different story. Which is not necessarily problematic, but the
problem is that these services provide the bare minimum of
compatibility to let you send and receive email to/from outside their
system. If you want to access *your* mail via IMAP or POP with a
standard client, you are straight out of luck. In the best case, you
can pay extra money to use a proprietary software gateway, if your
platform is supported. This is a deal breaker for me. I honestly
believe many of these systems were setup this way with the best of
intentions, for the sake of highly secure storage and transit, but
it's still a deal breaker for me. It's good old fashioned vendor
lock-in, for a good cause. You can't walk away from one of these
systems and take all your stuff with you.
Other SDF services are not so easily replacable. BBOARD and COM are
unique features of SDF, and if I left the SDF I'd be leaving those for
good. I am, of course, also an aNONradio DJ. I could move my show to
some other internet radio station, I'm sure, although this might mean
losing listeners, not that I have all that many. To be honest, I
don't place a lot of value on BBOARD, it's very low traffic given how
many users SDF has, and at least 50% of that traffic is people asking
for help with stuff that's broken. But COM and aNONradio are special
to me, listening to Intergalactic Wasabi Mix and chatting with
snowdusk and the other listeners in COM was what really drew me into
SDF in the first place. I want to remain a part of that community.
Since I'm using the tilde.zone Mastodon instance now, why not get a
shell account at one of the tildeverse.org-affiliated public access
unix servers, like tilde.team? I've thought about it. But this very
struggle I'm going through with SDF, having to replace a whole bunch
of services because just one of them is being so badly run, has
underscored for me the importance of not putting all your eggs in one
basket. The tilde.team folk, for example, seem like good folk. And I
could join them, get an email and maybe an XMPP (do they do that?),
migrate my aNONradio show to tilderadio and wash my hands of SDF for
good. But then if tilde.team did anything I really disagreed with,
five or ten years from now, I'd be in exactly the same boat. I think
it's best to get your services from multiple independent sources. If
one source turns out to be a bad actor, you can do the right thing and
walk away with a minimum of fuss (assuming you limit yourself to
services compatible with this). The ideal form of this practice is
"one service per provider", so using a tildeverse Mastodon instance
would rule out using a tildeverse solution for anything else. I may
end up utilising a slightly more relaxed version of this rule in the
form of "not too many services per provider", we'll see.
All of this has left me thinking quite a lot about the public access
unix sphere and it's future. I don't think SDF is going away anytime
soon, despite its myriad problems which have been around for years.
For every grumpy long-time user like myself who walks away, several
impressionable newcomers will sign up, lured by the name recognition
and sense of history. But for me, personally, I think, or at least
hope, that SDF will become less and less important. The idea of one
huge service provider serving tens of thousands of people feels like
something from the past - and not in a good way. We've seen a lot
of the problems that come from that model since 2010 or thereabouts.
Usually in a commercial setting, true, but SDF is the existence
proof that being non-commercial is not a cure-all for those problems.
While there is a lot of political baggage that goes along with
Mastodon that I don't care for at all, I take a lot of inspiration
from Mastodon, or at least from the Mastodon instances which, in my
opinion, do their job well. A large number of small or medium
(really, of "just large enough") communities which interact as equals,
with individual mobility between communities, is a *fantastic* model
for digital social interaction. Individual megalomaniacal admins can
only ever exercise control over a small part of the network, and when
they do, their users can flee. Small community sizes mean that
everybody knows (maybe almost) everybody else. If an admin mistreats
one user in a small community, it's a lot more visible. A lot of
other users know and trust that user that got pushed around, and it
can't get as easily buried or ignored. SDF is so large and has so
many non-overlapping sub-communities, plenty of users have probably
never even heard of Cat.
There's no reason public access unix systems can't be run more like
Mastodon. I think the tildeverse.org model is a great step in that
direction. A (small for now) number of participating tilde servers
("tilde" is basically a kind of community-owned brand name that some
public access servers choose to apply. It's a new-fangled thing,
relative to SDF, Grex, etc., but it's fundemantally the same kind of
thing) have joined a kind of collective organisation that coordinates
activity between those servers (not in a top-down kind of way, this is
all voluntary). The most concrete example of this is an IRC network.
There are IRC servers running on tilde.town, tilde.team and
yourtilde.com, and any shell user of any of those systems can just
connect their IRC client to "localhost". But content in a channel
on any one server's IRC server is also seen in the corresponding
channel on the other severs. This is amazing! It's like SDF users
being able to chat to Grex users, while logged into their respective
shell systems, without relying on any third parties other than SDF and
Grex, without the sysadmins of those systems allowing their users to
make outgoing IRC connections to arbitrary hosts. This approach
breaks, to some extent, the walled garden problem of public access
unix which I wrote about over a year ago[1]. I'm not that big of an
IRC user, but I think this approach is nothing short of excellent.
This idea could, obviously, be extended. One can, for example,
imagine a small NNTP network, permitting a kind of shared Usenet
between trusted shell systems. These kind of not-really-public,
not-really-closed, definitely decentralised approaches seem, to me, to
really hit a kind of sweet spot where they are less susceptible to a
lot of the problems associated with totally open public systems (spam,
unaccountability of users, Eternal September) and with walled gardens
(lock-in, non-scalability, all-powerful admins).
If there's anything else I have to say about how public access unix
systems should be run, it's this. One: use free software. SDF fails
in this regard, and it's a bizarre paradox. 90% of the users are free
software enthusiasts, and we all happily use proprietary non-standard
things like COM and BBOARD. It can, and should, be otherwise. I'm
(slowly) trying to make the Zaibatsu a model of how this can be done -
check out the gopher frontend to our git repos[2]! Two: let your
users help. One of SDF's biggest problems is that the user to admin
ratio results in a crippling workload for the people in charge, which
leads to things falling apart. SDF is full of dedicated and
responsible people who've been there for years and would love to help
lighten the load, but there is just no interest in this from on top,
as far as I can tell. Done properly, this doesn't just lighten the
load, it improves response time by making sure that the people with
the power to fix problems are those who are affected by them! Nobody
wants SDF's gopher server to run smoothly more than the phloggers, and
nobody wants aNONradio to run smoothly more than the DJs. But those
people - even the ones who have been contributing for years and years,
sometimes not just with their time and content but their money too -
have no more control over those systems than somebody who just signed
up yesterday. Long serving, reliable generators of high quality
content are a digital community's most valuable asset. They should be
identified and given just enough power to help out with the stuff they
need to continue being an asset. This can of course be done very
gradually, very slowly, to minimise risk.
If you've read this far, I thank you. If you are remotely interested
in exchanging ideas about the future of public access unix, or in
putting these ideas into practice, please reach out to me. I am
considering making circumlunar.space into a test bed for some of these
ideas, after consulting with the sundog community. Because, you know,
that's what good admins do.
[1]
gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/two-walls-good-four-walls-bad.txt
[2]
gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/software
