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.