Tilde Communities And The Smolnet

We have an open debate regarding the tildeverse, and whether it actually fits into the notion of the Smolnet in practice. It feels a bit ... branded. Like there's a faint odor of corpo seeping out when it sheds its Converse and kicks its feet up.

Here's the thing. Some of us enjoy building tools, and others want to use the tools to build something. Hence, the marketed notion of the tildeverse, where *somebody* spins up a server and then *others* get accounts and are able to cruft together their own pages that get served. Theoretically these tildes are built around communities of people with shared interests ... but in practice these are not necessarily *local communities* and that's a big part of many of our social problems: distraction away from the extremely important need to pay attention and engage on a local level in whatever constitutes your particular community.

So, wait a minute, you say.

This whole "tilde" thing sounds just like the Good Old Days where somebody would build a linux box, hook it up to the Interwebs, and give their mates an account. Or a bunch of them would pool their money to get a bigger, better box than any single one of them could afford, and then they'd stick it in Jimmy's grandmother's basement and tie it into the phone line, because hell, Grandma didn't make that many calls. BBS FTW, bitches.

Yeah. That's exactly what the tildeverse is: a rebranding of an old idea. A shared computing resource probably geolocated way the hell away from you and run by hopefully somebody trustworthy, but equally possibly by a sweaty teenager in Vienna or a more unsavory equivalent who has their fingers In Your Pie.

The Big Problem with a shared computing resource is that your content is utterly dependent on the dedication, skills and ethics of the brave soul(s) maintaining the server whilst wearing the sysadmin hat. That is called a single point of failure.

We highly encourage you to spin up your own personal server. The skills aren't impossible to acquire, and it puts *you* in control of your technology and the destiny of your content, rather than relying on Somebody Else, regardless of their good (or ill) intentions.

If that task is too daunting, then we'd encourage you to find a local guru who is willing to take on the task and spin up a specific server instance for *you and your tribe* rather than joining a random network of people. The guru should be a person or persons who are willing to teach those who are willing to learn so that in time *several* members of the community can take on the management of the resource as needed. It bears repeating: key personnel are single points of failure, and those are a Very Bad Thing. Ceding control of your tools and infrastructure to an external unknown entity is An Equally Bad Thing.