Book Review: Fiction

"36 Streets" by T.R. Napper (2022) - Cyberpunk/SciFi

30 Mar 2025

Book Review: Nonfiction

"Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart" by Nicholas Carr (2025)

29 Mar 2025

Communities: or.. why I'm trying tilde servers

I've been a member of a lot of online communities in my life. My favorites, in retrospect, have been relatively small. Probably a thousand people or less in total, and barely fifty to a hundred regulars. Sometimes it ends up much smaller -- on one long-gone IRC server, carefully hidden in an inaccessible little corner of the Internet, the community was probably a dozen or less, if we're talking regulars. And a group of about four of us in a private channel that formed a close bond, spending too many evenings chatting about a variety of things, ranging from books to movies to security vulnerabilities to various online dramas at the time. Two of those four people are dead now.. one due to overdose (everybody saw that coming), another by their own choice (I've never been able to shake the feeling that I should have seen that coming, too). The third? Deliberately disappeared, to avoid some potential consequences of other decisions outside the community. It feels weird that I have this memory of literally hundreds of hours of insightful, nuanced discussions of a variety of things.. and I might be the only person left on Earth that remembers that.

The best things in life are often ephemeral, though. It's hard to deal with the sense of loss when they're gone, but that doesn't diminish their value.

Back in the mid-90's, I mostly lived on MOO's. I loved the mixture of creating (building new things for other people to enjoy) and being able to communicate with people from all over the place. I think any community that's going to be successful needs an element of collaborative creation to it. At least an awareness that it's a shared world, with an eye towards making it better for everyone. It's funny how casual the Internet was in the mid-90's -- even with things like shell accounts. I started and ran one of the larger MOO's back in that era, and we hosted it on university Solaris boxes that professors just..loaned us. Hey, here's a SPARCstation with direct Internet access, here's the root password, that should work, stranger. Here's a $25,000 workstation that isn't being used, let's let some rando person use it. And that worked out just fine. Mostly. To put that money in perspective, I was working fulltime at a crappy job and had to save up for six weeks to buy a tiny, overpriced hard 125Mb drive so I could install an early version of Slackware Linux on a 486/20 PC. The <$30/mth for dialup Internet access I was paying was a not-trivial monthly expense. I think it was comparable to my cable bill.

I've also found solid communities on forums, back in the day, but only when the forums were focused on something specific. A specific interest or hobby.. it's almost like people have to find a common thread to pretend they're focusing on, then they get comfortable enough with each other to actually build connections.

From a technical perspective, there's a lot I find appealing about tilde servers as a foundation for a community where I might fit in. There's a steep learning curve but it's fairly easy to provide new functionality. If you set out to write a foundation for a community from scratch, you'd end up having to write miles of code. Sticking to text, sticking to UNIX permissions and security models.. those are relatively easy and mature. There are edges to it, sure. But there are edges to everything.

What I'm aiming at

I'm trying to find a more deliberate/intentional model of online interaction. I finished reading Superbloom, by Nicholas Carr, a few weeks ago, which focuses on social media and non-stop pushed feeds of data into our brains. There are a lot of interesting arguments that Carr makes in that, and I tend to agree with quite a few of them. I'll try to post an expanded review in the future. But the tl;dr is "humans kinda suck at processing information and a lot of the world we've built is making that increasingly problematic". I was trying to better understand why I feel like the world is increasingly fragmented. Everyone seems to live in a slightly-different bubble with increasingly-prickly edges. And by everyone, I damned sure include myself in that. I have enough self-awareness to know that something feels wrong all around.

As part of that process, I want a community with inherent deliberate boundaries. I want somewhere that I have to actively log IN to, then when I'm logged in, I want to actually BE there. Not alt-tabbing between a million blinking, screaming apps and interruptions. I think that's an important aspect. One of the interesting arguments that Carr made in "Superbloom" was that until relatively recently, the nature of the technology itself mediated how we used it. Want to communicate in written form over long distance? You used a typewriter and mailed something. Want to listen to things? You used a radio. Want to talk to someone? You used a telephone. You never tried to talk to someone on your typewriter, nor write on your telephone. But now? Now every screen can do all of it. And it does.

Identity

I like pseudononymous communities. I find a freedom in being me..but not necessarily having to reconcile this part of me with other perceptions one might have from Googling me by my real name. I have a day job, and it's a day job where they have opinions on how publicly their employees say certain things. I struggle with my day job sometimes.. in broad terms, I'm responsile for the cybersecurity of decent chunk of critical infrastructure that provides really important things to a huge chunk of the United States. That means that I work for a huge corporation, with weird edges involving fossil fuels and longterm environmental impacts and things that I'm not sure I'm in love with. But what I actually DO there? I'm proud of. Setting all that aside (i.e. "is THAT the way we should power the country?"), I work to stop other nations from impacting the things that keep people alive. I can live with that. Most days. But I can be a lot more ME when I'm not.. the public me, if that makes sense.

Pseudononymous communities also end up with their fair share of problems. It's always been that way, it always will. That limited amount of anonymity also empowers some folks to behave in ways they'd never behave with the lights switched on. Three decades ago, I was a firm supporter of free speech in every form, and I've tolerated epic amounts of things I personally find abhorrent. As I get older, though, I realize that some people just want to take a dump in your living room, and life's too short to pay any attention to that. Let them go crap in their own living rooms. So I guess I'm still a huge fan of free speech, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm willing to be in the audience for every show.

Short term goals in the tilde community:

Remember how in the hell to use IRC properly. It's been a while. There was a time when I knew weechat and irssi quite well, but that muscle memory has atrophied.
Figure out if anybody is still using gemini, then expand this site. I haven't decided if I even care if nobody is using it anymore.. I like it.
See if there's any active Usenet groups full of interesting folks
Post book reviews of things I've read that others might find interesting. I read an insane amount of books.. nonfiction, fiction, genre, Booker or Pulitzer prize-winning literature, totally trashy books, I'm an equal-opportunity reader.
See if any of the available tilde servers are the community I'm looking for. I started with tilde.pink, because I liked the boundaries of gopher/gemini hosting.. and because I hoped the ".pink" TLD might self-select away some of the less-tolerant potential members of a community. Or maybe it draws them like moths to a flame. Heck if I know. Guess I'll find out.