i've gotten my magic moments from the new wave of peer-to-peer projects that are quietly building in the undergrowth
stuff like browsing dat https://dat.foundation/ sites and zines https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/ in beaker browser https://beakerbrowser.com/, chatting away an evening in the cosy forums of the secure scuttlebutt https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ community. i've even gone so far as to create a small group chat thing for friend circles and small tech coops called cabal https://cabal.chat/ because i was tired of the state of affairs, of giant vc-funded platforms shutting down themselves or others
this new peer to peer stuff ( *small interlude: and it's not blockchain stuff, we're all broke and mostly doing it in ourspare time lol*) is so cool and exciting cause you *don't* need to run a server or know anyone that can, it just like, runs on yr computer or laptop. soon this idealistic post-climate change tech will be able to properly bridge the gap to mobile devices, for scuttlebutt there already exists apps https://www.manyver.se/ that bridge that gap
so yeah, i'd wanna say that there's always going to be people building stuff. the best thing to do is find yr people, meet them in real life over dinners and stories. there's a really cute and cheesy saying going around in the current p2p wave of things and it's that *the real peer-to-peer network is the friends you made along the way*. which is so cheesy it almost hurts, and also so very true
i think one big thing is having the time to build *a new normal*, instead of this prescribed one that deprives us of the joy of our sunsets. not needing to work 40 hour weeks (which honestly is way too much, not to mention the weeks some folx put in that come in *way *above that) in order to just have somewhere to sleep. on this topic i can't recommend the book Walkaway https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604388-walkaway, by Cory Doctorow, enough. it's a great look at what could be possible, and what more than a handful of my close online friends are already doing
a better world is possible, and it's made possible by things like tilde.club that allows us to find friends without mediating commercial interests that try to gull us into believing things that aren't in order to fill mansions with luxury at the expense of everything and everyone else
woah sorry for the screed everyone, i have Feelings on this topic
post rant: ok sorry i also have to recommend The Dispossessed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessedby Ursula Le Guin; once i've started recommending books i can't stop c
On Tue, 17 Sep 2019 at 16:35, Juliette Melton juliemelton@gmail.com wrote:
Yes to all of this. I recently gave up the php wrangling of Wordpress, and just built a new site using Squarespace. It was so fancy, so easy.
At the same time, though, I spun up a zine project that is neither fancy nor easy and it's been a series of wonderful sunrise moments to be crafting, writing, and sharing something that I care about with friends. And the content will never be online. (Sign up! crappyzineclub.com.)
Julie / @j / juliette.co
On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 7:51 AM Karen Cravens silver@phoenyx.net wrote:
On 9/17/19 12:21 AM, Paul Kruczynski wrote:
But related, tangentially, I've also been somewhat surprised how a lot of the people I know who were early adopters seem uninterested in such things anymore. Not just in making new, weird, questionably sustainable communities for your friends, but also privacy, controlling their own data, all that fun stuff.
Not really surprising, alas. It *is* exhausting, and there's always the temptation to just give in and use the fancy easy stuff.