I was checking out Lagrange, which is a web browser for the Project Gemini Internet protocol. The Gemini protocol is a text based, privacy focused communications protocol, and Lagrange renders the text beautifully.
But, during the course of checking it out, I was reminded of the Tildeverse. In short, tilde communities are playgrounds for people interested in multi-user *nix systems. It’s a kind of return to old *nix and BBS systems that you, if you are old enough, used to connect to with telnet or a modem, and features tools like IRC, which I haven’t used for years. There are a variety to choose from, e.g,, tilde.team, envs.net, tilde.club, ctrl-c.club, rw.rs, sdf.org, etc. Personally, I found the thinking behind rawtext.club in line with my attitudes about working from the command line, text, and the problems with social media. Their values include: off the web, DIY, resource minimalism, non-profit, and asynchronous. Here’s a bit from their social contract:
“People in democratic countries might be saying, “but don’t we have a government and legal system to protect us?”. In theory yes – but as history shows, these legal systems are often distorted to encourage those abuses. The corporations and wealthy individuals responsible are either good friends with governments, or hard at work “convincing” them. They are funding intense lobbying efforts to influence politicians, and entire media campaigns to erase public awareness of their work (or, similarly, to manufacture consent). The end result is that public service and regulations are being systematically dismantled and neutralized as an obstacle to reckless, short-sighted profiteering. The institutions that are nominally for the people, by the people, and designed to protect the people, turn out to be none of those, and we are being broken apart into a bickering sea of lonely individuals.”
https://rawtext.club/social-contract.html
cafebedouin.org 