My BIIG (BBS-IRC-ICECAST-GEMINI) Idea.

[BB_ROOK]

omething I thought about with my morning coffee.

With all the crap that goes online these days, and the small web being a nice return to root. I was pondering how to go about taking it another notch. Sounds like a fun little experiment.

And the best part, it would work on old or low-powered devices.

You start with BBS software (Mystic or Pyffle). Then you add an IRC server, like ngIRC,  Ircd-Hybrid and Charybdis. And then ICECAST. And you could add a low-overhead webserver, or go with a crazy idea of using Gemini. Servers would be Agate or something low-overhead.

The potential? Well toss in Meshstatic and you got yourself a nice decentralized "Pseudo internet" (for lack of better term)

Thoughts?

[Melooon]

The challenge with any online social space is not having the technology to make it work (that bit's easy) - the challenge is getting people to use it, and making it fit into peoples lives well enough so that they want to use it. Everything about big social media is designed to make people want to use big social media (and if not that, to trap them into using it). Within indie spaces, the more successful projects like status.cafe and neocities are successful because they are friendly and easy to use.

So my thoughts are; I always fully support people creating indie spaces, but you've got to forget about the technology, and think about what the experience will be for the humans who are gonna be making use of it, after that the technology is just a tool to make that experience happen

[Dan Q]

Talking my language. Love every one of those keywords.

I've never played with Meshstatic "for real", Does it have the bandwidth for something like Icecast?

And yeah, I see two challenges here:

1. As @Melooon says: engagement! Building a community space is surprisingly easy. Building a community is surprisingly hard. Because of this disparity, proto-communities have a plethora of possible spaces to commune. They go to a particular one because of the people, or the interests, represented there. Sometimes the interests intersect with the technologies used to make the platform work: that's why so many folks on shortwave radio talk to each other about... shortwave radio!

2. The second challenge is integration. Anybody can host half a dozen services on a node. But why those services? How do they interoperate? There are folks doing clever things in this space, combining SSH shells and web hosting and gem capsules and IRC... but they're all things that make interoperability... pretty easy! A BBS is cleverer for community-building, but there's probably more heavy lifting to make it interoperate with the Gemini stuff you're talking about. (I mean, unless my knowledge is even-more out of date than I think it is... last time I SysOp'd on a BBS it was dial-up-only, so you can see I'm showing my age rightaway!)

Anyway: everything you're saying sounds exciting from a technical standpoint. But don't forget the challenges!

[fsr]

It would be pretty cool to join a BBS that had functionality to write and edit gemtext, which then was hosted on agate. Most of the existing ways to publish gemtext (especially now that gemlog.blue no longer accepts new registration) require a level of savvy that would be a turnoff to many newcomers.

A BBS could provide a retro but still friendlier frontend. The question is, how would you access it? I'm sure I looked at Mystic at one point, but hosting a BBS isn't an ambition of mine. The closest I would get to that is writing a shell (which didn't handle accounts) that looked like a BBS but ran over SSH with a simple publicly-known password. This is what telnet was for of course. But I don't recommend using telnet for anything.

Without accounts, half the fun of a "real" BBS like messaging wouldn't exist. It would be useful for something like a help system or documentation, and I've done it before. You would be better off using an existing BBS package (as you said) if you want accounts.

I don't have anything against IRC as a protocol, but it's a lot of work to keep a channel under control. My guess is that if you offer an IRC channel, it will take up at least half the overall energy to moderate it as maintaining everything else.

[Dan Q]

The closest I would get to that is writing a shell (which didn't handle accounts) that looked like a BBS but ran over SSH with a simple publicly-known password.

It's possible to have interactive SSH servers that don't have any password-on-connect whatsoever, which is much more like a "BBS" experience. See e.g. snakes.run, which is no-login realtime multiplayer Snake... over SSH.

So you can absolutely build an SSH system that introduces itself then allows creation of or logging in to an account, just like a BBS. I keep meaning to play with wish, which aims to streamline writing such services in Go.

[warlock]

This is a great idea - so great that it already sort of exists!

Tilde communities, especially the older ones, generally have a lot of this functionality built in. I'm on one that has an internal mail server, IRC server, BBS, micro/macroblogging platform, and also includes public-facing http and gemini hosting. The only thing that I can think of it missing is Meshtastic.

The idea of creating a "micro-internet" is definitely fun and totally achievable, and a lot of tildes have some interconnected systems to allow IRC servers to cross-pollinate.