i agree with this message so much. i think the hardest part is finding your people. it is still possible to do, but there is so much less trust and good faith to be found online that it can be tricky if you don't have a friend of a friend, or a meetup in a populous area, or things like that. (i'm a lot more private now than i was a few years ago, and only just starting to do things like... reply to big mailing lists, or speak to anyone online outside of a small private circle.)

anyway, time to put a library hold on Walkaway.

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 9:53 AM Alexander Cobleigh <alexander.cobleigh@gmail.com> wrote:

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 sites and zines in beaker browser, chatting away an evening in the cosy forums of the secure scuttlebutt
community. i've even gone so far as to create a small group chat thing for friend circles and small tech coops called

cabal 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 our
spare 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 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, 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 by 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.