I've been quieter than normal recently.

Time to fix that.

This is a thread about the things that I am working on/thinking about, and how they relate back to the current state of the world.

It's going to be one of /those/ threads, probably, so please forgive me if it takes me a little while to respond to you if you jump in the replies. I'll get there, I promise.

But first, some music.

I'm thinking Blues, but I'm always thinking Blues. Let's see what I can find on the shelves.

Alright, I'm spinning a shockingly clean copy of The Original American Folk Blues festival (if you've never heard it, do yourself a favor), drinking a cup of coffee (Decaf! The Horror!) and thinking about the #internet, the #web, #gopher, #usenet, The American Media Oligopoly, #copyright, #DIYMedia and the #PublicDomain.

It's been stormy. My head is cloudy, my bones ache, and I'm honestly terrified to my core of the future.

So this should be fun!

Sometime between 10 years ago and 5 years ago, @Ethancdavenport suggested to me that it'd be really cool if we could get a bunch of little intranets connected to one another all over the country/planet, and rebuild the internet.

This was honestly probably in the wake of the first brush with SOPA/PIPA?

God that seems like it was ancient history.

And it was probably before that, and just came up again in the wake of SOPA/PIPA.

Either way, the idea struck a chord with me.

The exact genesis of the idea isn't super important.

The point is that I started thinking about networking without/outside the internet.

As time has worn on, this idea has moved closer and closer to the forefront of my mind.

I've done various experiments with BBS style systems, and shared servers.

I spent too much time reading about the history of Usenet, and watching documentaries about BBSs, and just *thinking* about what a national or a global non-internet would look like.

This idea comes up any time anything bad happens to the internet (Like, you know, the Net Neutrality rollback, or the pending European copyright clusterfuck)

I've written some blog posts about it. When I talk about it on Mastodon I usually use the hashtag #mBBS or #alternet although I sometimes forget to do this.

I've written a lot, in other places about how the modern web is a trashfire. I'm not going to re-hash all those ideas here, but I'll sum up:

- Massive downloads for no reason
- Arbitrary code execution
- Tracking you constantly (advertising)
- Increasingly silo'd
- Tracking you constantly (NSA Panopticon)
- Bad Laws (we'll discuss this at length.)
- EME/DRM in browsers

We could also talk about how the modern Internet is a trash fire, but that'd basically just be me saying "NAT makes it difficult to self host, and we need more ISPs to offer IPv6 addresses" and ... well that's not what I want to talk about right now.

Before I go any further, I want to talk about USENET.

Do you remember usenet?

I'm going to quote wikipedia about usenet so that I can save myself some time.

"Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.

Users read and post messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups."

More from the wiki article on usenet:

"Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

And then, the good bit. Which won't fit in this toot and will need to go in the next one.

"One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another in so-called news feeds. Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server operated by a commercial usenet provider, their Internet service provider, university, employer, or their own server."

So that's ~1200 characters of Usenet summary from wikipedia.

The whole article isn't bad, honestly, but that has most of the bits you need to understand where I'm going.

The important points to take away:
- Usenet predated the internet by a good while
- You still connect to a usenet server, but you (traditionally) connected directly to it over dialup
- Usenet fully supports servers popping up and disappearing all the time.
- At this point, usenet is mostly spam, piracy, and viruses.

Like BBSs, Usenet is basically only accessed over the internet today.

Traditionally, though, there wasn't an internet.

usenet posts spread by having college servers straight up call one another, and transfer data. (Or, in some cases, by mailing truck loads of tape to another continent in order to bootstrap a new server, because it took less time to arrive than it would have over dialup.)

So your local server fetches the posts.

Then, people with shell accounts on those multi user servers could log in to their account, and fetch the news to their local newsreader.

They'd treat the messages kind of like emails. When they were done, they press a button, and sync their new posts back to their local usenet server.

The next time their server calls another server, those posts propagate the whole network.

In some ways, it was honestly a lot like the current fediverse. In other ways, it was not at all like the current fediverse.

If you want to get a feel for what it was like, check this out: http://olduse.net/

It's an archive of Usenet, updating in real time, as if people were making these posts.

And that's *really* fucking cool.

Here's some more information about the Old Usenet website: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/announcing_olduse.net/

There was, at one time, a blog post about trucking the tapes across Canada too, but I can't find a copy of that which is still online.

Shame, but that's the way these things go.

Alright!

So Usenet was designed to allow people all over the place to talk to one another over intermittent, slow, indirect connections.

These schools and other places used a lot of the same ideas for cross system Email, if I'm not mistaken. I dunno, it's been a long time since I read about email.

The upshot, though, is that we have something of a template for how to propagate certain kinds of information over shitty intermittent connections.

Of course, usenet isn't a solution today, because the problems we're trying to solve today aren't the problems that usenet solved.

But it's important to think about, and to remember, that The Web isn't the only way.

Which brings us back to the internet, and the ways it's falling apart.

Personally, my biggest concern about the modern internet is that the whole thing is resoundingly fragile, while acting like it is indestructible. (https://boingboing.net/2016/11/11/the-internets-core-infrastru.html)

It was designed to be fault tolerant. It was designed to be censorship resistant.

In some ways, it is!
In other ways, it's a massive, ubiquitous tool of surveillance.

The Web was designed to deliver documents with light markup, and it's now used as an application layer, complete with arbitrary code execution.

The internet, and the web, are so big that they are resistant to change. They have inertial mass.

I gotta do another quick sidebar here.

Ultimately, what I want to talk about is building a regional (then national, the international) network that has more in common with fidonet and BBSs and Usenet than the internet, and how we could do that, and what it would look like.

But, before I do that, I gotta talk about one of the biggest reasons that the modern internet is less good than I want it to be, and that's The Copyright Industry.

I have a lot to say about copyright, and I also just recieved some Pizza. So I'm going to eat, and then I'll talk about copyright, why big content is evil, and what I think we should be doing about it.

Then I'll circle back around to how to build a new fidonet.

Okay, Pizza has been consumed.

So a lot of the threats to the internet come in the form of real shitty laws that the content industry or the telcom industry (and, in case you weren't aware, these are often the Same Companies) really want to see passed.

Content companies, that is to say, Disney and the rest, are evil at their heart.

I've covered the ways why before:
http://ajroach42.com/diy-media/

and I've talked a little bit about what to do about it.

I wanna do more of the second.

Simply put, we have to stop giving money to our media oligopoly.

That means we have to stop paying for media made within that media oligopoly.

That means we have to start making our own media, consuming more public domain media, using the local library's DVD collection and, when all else fails, piracy.

I can't help with the second two, but I can sure as hell help with the first two.

This is one of the small number of projects I'm actively working on.

I currently have a library of ~1000 feature films, a few dozen film serials, and hundreds of TV shows and Radio Programs that are in the public domain.

I'm working to catalog and organize these and get them in to a format that is consumable from other people.

I'm focusing on tracking down the best available copies of these public domain works, and on presenting them in a way that is conducive to discovery.

Of course, you'll also be able to submit your own CC-BY or CC-BY-SA content, which our team of crack reviewers (that is to say, me and a coupla punks I know) will consume and categorize along side the PD stuff.

In an ideal world, we could become something less like Project Gutenberg for film, and more like a repository of the best DRM free Open Licence video and audio in the world.

But I'd settle for PG for film, if that's where we land.

But the big tech companies are trying to make running sites that accept user submissions onerously expensive. Essentially impossible.

If the EU copyright thing passes, I wouldn't really be able to afford to operate in the EU. (and that's without the burden of international copyright to think about.)

I don't kid myself that I stand a chance of actually making an impact on the bottom line of hollywood, but starving them financially is only part of the goal. Getting them out of my head is the other.

Okay, back to building a modern distributed BBS/Usenet system.

I've talked about doing this within Dat or something like SSB, presenting something that pretends to be the modern web, complete with all it's problems, but only gives you access to whatever files are stored locally.

I've talked about doing it with something like UUCP or NNTP on the server side. I've even considered just using newsreaders on the client side.

...

There are problems with all of these approaches on the client side and the server side.

Let's ignore the "how" for a minute and talk about what I want to accomplish.

I want a network of servers (I usually call them nodes in my head) that a user can interact with from their laptop or mobile device over a wireless network.

I want these nodes to present local chat, a local and a global message board, something akin to email, and something akin to web pages.

If we have video content or audio content, that's also fine with me.

I want users to be able to sync any of this content to their local device, and for them to be able to set aside a portion of storage space on their device to serve as carrier pigeon space, if they choose to do so.

I want the nodes to be able to sync data directly, if the opportunity is available. I want them to be able to sync data via sneakernet or dialup or RF or long range wifi, and for them to be able to be certain of the data's origin, and that it has not been tampered with.