So much cool stuff ------------------ Greetings, gopherverse! I've been really busy for the past few weeks, which is why I've not phlogged recently. This has actually been *really* difficult because there is just so much cool stuff happening in gopherspace and the blossoming indie-pubnixspace (which really needs a name!), and so much fascinating meta-discussion *about* that cool stuff. I also feel really bad that so many of the new Zaibatsu phloggers have been churning out really high quality, topical content that I've not had the time to respond to yet (rest assured, I'm reading!). I'm hoping I can catch up a bit this weekend, but I've been spurred to write something briefish tonight in response to some recent happenings/posts. First of all, let me quickly say that the launch of cosmic.voyage by Tomasino[1] and announcement of tilde.tel by Cat[2] in response to my "Hey you, host something"[3] have exceeded in every way my expectations of what would come from that post. I am *so* excited about these projects. Thanks and kudos to Tomasino and Cat both. Honestly, I feel like I'm hanging out in the coolest part of the entire internet right now. This is awesome. Jynx[4] and Tomasino[5] wrote some stuff about federated pubnix and, honestly, it kind of felt like they'd been rummaging in my brain. I've thought, and written, about a lot of the ideas they mentioned in recent weeks, but in scattered places - emails to people, BBS posts at the Zaibatsu, random Mastodon posts. But I haven't done a very good job of posting clearly thought out ideas in easy to find places, like my phlog. I want to sieze on one particular thing Tomasino said, about getting the local mail on cosmic.voyage to work nicely with some Tildeverse servers but not the wider world. I floated precisely this idea on the Zaibatsu BBS a few weeks ago, after slugmax and I had been talking about how to get mail working between the Zaibatsu and the Republic which will be launched soon as the second "colony" in the Circumlunar Universe. It turns out it's quite easy indeed to configure Postfix to only allow mail in/out from/to a whitelist of domains, and of course you can use your filewall to back this up by limiting SMTP connections to the corresponding servers. So I figured, why not also allow interchange with say, SDF, Grex and Tildeverse servers? These places are very unlikely to be a source of spam, and if there is any trouble, the admins of these places are likely pretty easy to get in touch with. Nobody was actively opposed to this idea, but most people were, I guess, uninterested, because they already have "real" email addresses which work everywhere. I'm thinking now of doing it anyway, just to test the idea and the config. Tomasino, I'm happy to experiment setting this up between the Zaibatsu and cosmic.voyage if you like, just drop me a line. I think this idea extends to lots of things besides email. Outgoing SSH is one. Zaibatsu users can SSH to Grex and to MetaARPA/ARPA-only SDF servers, and that's it (though I've made it clear people can ask for other places to be whitelisted in the BBS's REQUESTS board!). IRC should also be straightforward. I would *love* to experiment with NNTP. I've started to think of this idea as something like recreating or reenacting the very early internet, back when all the machines online were at universities or government/military research centers, and there were so few an admin could maintain a routing table by hand, looking at the hand-drawn network diagram pinned up on their wall; where all the admins probably had all the other admins' phone numbers in their address book. Something like one dozen smallish, independent pubnix servers could support several hundred users easily, while still being a small enough set that people could configure their firewall whitelist by hand without it being super impractical. By not allowing incoming connections from the outside world, it's extremely likely that there would be no, or very very little, spam, advertising or general abuse. Users also couldn't get up to that much mischief, as they couldn't e.g. send spam to anywhere in the outside world. Just a cozy little network of unix geeks, voluntarily cutting themselves off from the outside world to do things their own way. Not quite a walled garden in the traditional sense, because the participating servers are independent and the network is open-ended. New ones can be brought in if they're going to play nice. If any server stops playing nice, the others can choose to remove it from their whitelists. This seems like a fantastic way for a decentralised network of shell providers to function. I'd love to hear people's thoughts. [1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20181124-cosmic-voyage [2] gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20181128.txt [3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/hey-you-host-something.txt [4] gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20181128.post [5] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20181128-re-jynx-so-much-cool-stuff-going-on