On 9/16/19 1:45 PM, Jon Bell wrote:
Many (all?) of us are overwhelmed and disheartened by today’s internet. So here’s a question to the group, as a die hard tildee. How can we make something like this last longer than a sunrise?
The original tilde.club moment came at a kind of crucial inflection point for me, when a job I'd been giving everything I had for a long time was falling apart because of the same tendencies and people who have turned the internet at largee into a torrent of shit. tilde.club was one of the things giving me some hope for an alternative to all that. I was really angry and strangely optimistic all at the same time. It seemed like there was so much to be done, so much that still *could* be done.
tilde.club itself turned out to be a momentary flash of nostalgia/art/networking/etc. for a collection of internet cool kids. A neat thing as far as it went but mostly a gesture at a shared longing for some things our culture has set aside and some roads not taken, and more than a little bit an outcropping of in-club privilege for an already well-connected elite. Still, it pointed at a bunch of interesting ideas: social unix servers as lasting institutions, the good stuff about the old web, federation of shared resources as an escape mechanism from the centralized near-monopolies, the utility of text, the importance of small silos and hidden byways for community...
In the last 5 years I've come to think of the network we have as mostly pathological, bound up in and accelerating the pathologies of our culture and economy. I've lost hope entirely for some things I once cared about fiercely, the web itself high on that list. Most of the work I've ever done appears to have been in service of ideas that are in a state of total defeat. (Well, that and accidentally making a handful of bad people permanently wealthy.)
In that same time, people have explored the tilde notion quite a bit on other servers than this one. It has its own discontents. There're tensions between nostalgia and experimentation, nerd fetishism and simple community, etc. But good stuff has still come out of it. Myself, I run a tiny IRC server for some friends, hang out on the fediverse a little, chat with some folks on tilde.town, and spend as much time as I can get away with camping at festivals the like, nowhere near the internet at all.
Those are the places I get my sunrises, literal or metaphorical: The small ones that exist where the bulk of the network isn't looking. The quiet gaps and the smalltime house parties and the side roads. I don't think any one thing is ever going to be the solution, but I think that when the world is burning, this is a lot of what you can do, and a lot of what you _have_ to do: Keep something humane alive at the margins. Hold some space where the general evil loses its power.
I guess I don't exactly know where I'm going with this except my answer to the original question is: Do that thing. Make some space out at the margins. And maybe try to share it with more people who aren't already the cool kids.