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!