gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/five-years-a-sundog-happy-birthday-circumlunar-space.gmi

The Zaibatsu itself actually has changed remarkably little in those five years. The biggest change happened earlier this year when for we became a little less low-spec, upgrading for the first time from our original 128MB of RAM to a positively decadent 512MB. This was a bitter-sweet moment for me. We always had a strong self-identity as "the little server that could", a resource-strapped place where strange folks counted individual precious bytes and used small tools. For the first time in my life I started to think of Python as fat! The single strongest push to get more memory was not actually that we needed it ourselves, but that the operating system did. After upgrading to Debian 10, 128MB was not even enough to run the apt package management tools without them getting OOM killed (maybe more swap would have made it viable, but OpenVZ virtualisation leaves me with no control over that). Now upgraded to Debian 11 and with more RAM than we ever dreamed of, we are offering Gemini hosting and highly restricted, strongly opinionated web hosting too (via Shizaru, 'natch). Oh, and Tor doesn't fall over due to memory exhaustion every couple of days anymore, so now our Gopherspace is *reliably* accessible as a hidden service.

What *has* changed in a big way since March 2018 is that a whole little universe has grown up around the Zaibatsu. Not *literally* around it. The Zaibatsu is not the centre of circumlunar space. Instead, it orbits around the common centre of mass it shares with its two sister colonies. These are the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic (hereafter the Republic), which appeared later in 2018, and the Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency (hereafter the Soviet), which appeared toward the end of 2020. These three colonies are three separate public access unix servers, running three distinct operating systems (Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD on the Zaibatsu, Republic and Soviet, respectively), but hosting a single, unified community. Each server is paid for and administered independently. Nobody has root access to more than one colony. Nobody ever has and nobody ever will. But users on any server can and do interact freely with users on any other, because the three server admins cooperate to make it possible by opening the relevant holes in the firewalls which largely shield us from the outside world. We can exchange email, we can chat on an internal IRC network, and we converse on a home-grown BBS system. The BBS is filesystem based. Each board is a directory in /var/bbs/boards, each thread is a subdirectory of its corresponding board, each post in a thread is a file in that thread's subdirectory. Cron jobs use rsync over ssh to regularly push and pull new content between the colonies. Downtime on one server does not prevent users on the others from posting, or from reading posts made by users of the server that is down earlier. Data loss on any one server can be fixed by restoring from any of the others. We wrote and maintain the software for reading and writing posts ourselves, and have shared the source with the world. It's far from perfect, but I'm extremely proud of it.

Our community only really has two norms, three if you count a fanatical devotion to Gopher. One is that every colony has a clearly defined procedure whereby at any time any user can request the immediate and permanent deletion of their account and all their hosted content, no reasons required, no questions asked. We don't plead with you to try to change your mind, we don't give you a two week cool off period where you can reactivate your account if you change your mind. You say the magic words, "I claim my civil right", and you and your data are gone. Digital self-ownership is a fundamental principle in circumlunar space. The second is that we do not attempt to grow without limit. Each of the three colonies has a user cap, roughly proportional to the system resources available. There are, at any given point in time, supposed to be only 32 "active" users of the Zaibatsu, 64 of the Republic and 48 of the Soviet. People come and go from Circumlunar Space, as any other digital community, and when somebody doesn't post in years and stops answering their emails, we mothball the account (yep, I'm well behind on this chore at the Zaibatsu) and announce room for one more. The sum population of active sundogs (that's what we call colony members) at any time should not exceed 144. This gives a small margin of error before we bump into the infamous Dunbar's number of 150, the number of people with whom one can supposedly maintain a stable social relationship. The idea of such a cognitive limit is debatable, and we are not attached to a specific number or particular theories of anthropology or psychology. We simply believe that small, slowly changing communities, where each person can at least aspire to being passingly familiar with every other person, naturally foster healthier and happier social dynamics than large, anonymous cyberhives. We especially believe that no individual admin should have power over or responsibility for so many users that someone with a problem is "just another user from the pile".

There's more to circumlunar space than just the three colonies. Any sundog can set up a server that offers additional non-shell services to the community or to the public and have that server designated as a circumlunar outpost, and we have a few of those, too. There's an XMPP outpost which offers accounts to users from any of the colonies. The Red Consensus and Ryumin's Dome both offer unconventional forms of Gopherspace to the public. And gemini.circumlunar.space is an outpost, too - kind of a strange one, by historical accident it has ended up doing double duty as the official home of a separate project. That'll get resolved and clarified some time this year, in the gentlest, most non-destructive way I can manage.

Most of what I've described above is activity that's only visible "from the inside", to sundogs with shell access to a colony. This is fine! While openness is good and sharing is caring, it's also important for communities - especially ones which are swimming upstream, going against the grain, tilting at windmills - to have spaces where its members can simply be themselves, amongst the like-minded. But circumlunar space is far from being a cloistered community, cut off from the wider 'net. It's not just that we exchange email with the other pubnix servers on our hand-curated Postfix permit lists (although that's worked out just lovely - a completely spam free, automated notification free, purely geeky-human-to-geeky-human inbox!). Public Gopherspace, and more recently Geminispace, is a core part and parcel of the deal. In fact, the standard procedure at the Zaibatsu is that new recruits are first given only sftp access to these spaces. An invite to get full shell access, and hence email, BBS, and IRC access, is extended only after a public presence on the small internet has been created and tended long enough. There's no requirement to be profound or insightful or funny. You just have to participate and give the impression you plan to keep it up. I think my rule of thumb in the early days was something like 10 phlog posts or 3 months of updates, whichever came second (so spamming 10 short posts in 2 or 3 days didn't cut the mustard). This means that Zaibatsu sundogs are all, if nothing else, writers. There are people in circumlunar space who have been active in Gopherspace for years whom I've never seen post to our BBS even once - nothing wrong with that! And when people stop writing in Gopherspace and drift elsewhere without explicitly asking us to delete their content or doing it themselves, that writing becomes a part of the small internet that will last as long as we will, to be stumbled upon and read by who knows how many future explorers over the years to come. And so, despite me starting out by singing all the praises of our nifty, decentralised, hacked-together, pubnix geeky goodness above, it would be hard to deny that the space's most visible, most enduring and perhaps most important aspect is its collective contribution to the distributed electronic library that everyone reading this surely knows and loves. And I'm not one bit less proud of our achievements there. Heck, if anything, I might be prouder. After all, the whole idea of "the small internet" was coined (to the best of my knowledge - at the very least popularised) in a phlog hosted at the Republic (spring, you've been quiet a long while! Hope you're healthy and happy, and if you're reading this: thank you!).

These five years have been a blast. And while we're not always the most active corner of the net, I think we're very far indeed from being out of steam, and I can easily see, and eagerly look forward to, another five years of this experiment. I would like to thank all the sundogs of circumlunar space, past, present and future, for all their contributions large and small to this unique community. Special thanks to slugmax (one of the very first to join the Zaibatsu!), who recently stepped down after over four years of service as admin of the Republic, and to mieum, who has stepped up to fill that role.

The note I'd like to end on this: I wish circumlunar space was *less* unique than I feel it is. I wish there were more communities like this. Lots of them. Deliberately small and deliberately slow, without single points of failure, without lock-in mechanisms, with costs and maintenance burdens spread across multiple people, with an ethos of volunteerism and doing-it-yourself. These things are beautiful, and they're not even hard. We're doing most of it with off-the-shelf tooling, some of which is decades old. This is what unix was *made* for! Yep, being an admin requires a non-trivial skillset, but each admin can support dozens of users. And not every sundog is a grey bearded master of grep, awk and sed, not even close - but I reckon more than a few of them know more today than they did when they joined. Public access unix is a wonderful, glorious thing. It's not for everybody, it's not the answer to every question, but it's fantastic and I think we are far, far away from the saturation point. I hope that we see more new players in this space soon, and more innovation from existing ones!

Five years a sundog - Happy birthday, circumlunar space!