Andrew (R.S Admin) @ajroach42@retro.social

My blog has moved!

You can find me at http://ajroach42.com

Okay, so my instructions were either very slightly wrong or just outdated, and I would have probably noticed more quickly if I wasn't using systemd.

But anyway, I found the issue (I created a file instead of letting tor create the file), and I can now ssh over tor.

Next! configure BBS.

My notes on the tor tilde were incomplete, so I'm now figuring out the last couple of details (and trying to troubleshoot why tor isn't starting on this pi, but that's neither here nor there.)

I should have everything working and ready to test soon.

When I was small, I loved nesquik.

Now I'm large.

I had not had nesquik in twentyish years.

I have now consumed nesquik.

It's still great.

When talking about his attempt to extort a political favor out of the ukrane, or maybe his tax returns, I dunno I only caught the headline in passing, it appears Trump used the phrase "my crimes can't be investigated while I'm president."

... my crimes.

My CrimeS

What a world we live in.

(feedback and suggestions welcome)

I don't love that name, but it's a good descriptor for the moment.

There are still a lot of details to work out, but the upshot is that a modern BBS style communication mechanism that is federated, has access controls and the ability to edit and delete posts, and has *no dependency on the internet* is within our grasp.

PLUS! if you're hosting a thing yourself in your own home, at rest encryption actually Means Something, because you can be reasonably certain that no one has unauthorized physical access to your machine while it is running.

If I'm going to encourage people to use Tor and to host content on onion addresses, I should also explain to them how to interact with those addresses in a way that a human can be expected to use.

My target audience has never used a host file before, so I just want to help ease them in to things.

Onion addresses are not required for UUCP, UUCP is not required for Markdown Social. These are just things that can work well together.

As for the rest of it:

Onion addresses are a great tool for not having to fool with DNS or port forwarding, but still being able to serve traffic from your computer.

But they're basically impossible to remember.

So you make a file on your computer where you make up a name for a place (say retro.social.bbs) and forward that to an onion address.

Back before we had DNS servers, we did this with IP addresses for the whole internet.

Well, I guess I'm not sure exactly what you've got.

A delay tolerant social network that can work with any transport layer under the sun.

The best bits of usenet, but with some modern sensibilities.

You can drop in your own encryption, you can add a mechanism in the display layer to allow for replies and nested conversations.

You can divorce networked communication from the web and from the internet wholesale.

The files can be compiled to ATOM or RSS or plaintext, they can be processed as newsgroup items or emails.

*The files never have to touch the open internet, and could be swapped back and forth via sneakernet or any other means.*

So add to that UUCP. Consider that UUCP will work over LAN.

Add some rules about which servers get which files, and some handshaking, and some decent tools for interacting with the finished files, and you've got ...

Now, the above tools aren't *trivial* to implement, but they should be straightforward. It's all plaintext and signatures and hashes and text processing. Unix and Unixish systems are *really* good at that. Most of this can be accomplished with existing utilities, or written from scratch reasonably quickly.

I'm saying "static sites" here because that's a concept a lot of us are familiar with, but there is no reason these things need to get compiled to HTML.

So we take that idea and couple it with some tools for signing the files, and verifying the sources of the files, and verifying that the files have not been tampered with in transit, (and managing edits and deletes) and we have a system that allows for the distribution of social content that is distribution mechanism agnostic.

Offline first social networking.

Delay tolerant social networking.

(but wait, there's more.)

So, piggy back on that and set up a very simple file format for encapsulating someone's social posts, blog posts, and forum posts.

For this part, think Jekyll or Hugo. Just a markdown text file with some YAML front matter. Except instead of plain websites, it generates social feeds for individuals and groups, forums, RSS feeds, etc.

We'll probably some tools that automatically generate the markdown files, and tools to consume the files, but we'll get to that later.

The venerable wikipedia says: "UUCP is an abbreviation of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers."

Back in the dialup days, pre-internet, college computers would call one another and UUCP files back and forth. It's a simple, not super robust method of automated file transfer between machines.

Originally designed for newsgroups and email.

If everything goes well with my tilde/BBS project, I'll work on getting UUCP set up, and write up some instructions for hostnames > onion addresses with a host file and then start working on UUCP and this static site generator for social media idea I have kicking around in my head.

That was a big sentence.

Let's break that down.

As for distribution, these will get dropped off one or two of each at the local little free libraries, and left on the magazine rack at the local coffee shops.

I'm looking for more/better topics and better locations for distribution.