Hello comrades!
I want to outline a few potential projects the Lemmygrad community could benefit from and expand its reach. I think they could foster real growth and be not only of help, but actively create counter-spaces to the Right in various domains.
FOSS in this case means free and open source. For more information, check out this.
Privacy Guide
I’m personally interested in tech privacy. The biggest places around are r/privacy, and PrivacyGuides, the de facto flagship website for privacy and security advice.
The sub-Reddit is known to be overtly against China and non-western FOSS communities. It’s mostly a circlejerk of Westerners screaming “We don’t want to be like 1984 China!” without any kind of material analysis. Besides, Reddit is Reddit and we know how that goes.
Now, PrivacyGuides. It is definitely a helpful resource, but there are a few issues with it. First off, the administrators frequently promote Apple products on their forum, one of them, Jonathan, even being an Apple fanboy. Apple products are non-FOSS and shouldn’t be trusted, especially since they’re in PRISM and collaborate with the NSA. This leaves out all the drama they’ve been through since they split with privacytools.io, the latter claiming PrivacyGuides stole thousands of euros from them.
What I’m saying is that I think there’s a need for a more community-based approach, with a strong Marxist tendency to counter liberals and conservatives (and sometimes ancaps) in the privacy field. This has the potential to educate people, even radicalize perhaps. This is related to the second project.
edit: We could also add an Internet etiquette guide for Lemmygrad members. This could include safety procedures while posting, general privacy advice and more, in order to not get targeted by the US.
Hosted Services
Lemmygrad can expand itself and offer hosted services for its members. They can include a Git forge, e-mail (although this one is debatable if it’s worth it because of security practices), PeerTube, and any other service that is deemed useful by the community. I think the format outlined below could be useful.
I’m tying up my idea here with the concept of public access unix systems, or short for “pubnixes”. They’ve recently had a revival, the tradition dating back to the '80s. In a nutshell, someone provides a Linux/BSD server and gives user accounts to people who request them. It has a strong focus on using the shell, and anti-corporate service alternatives. Sadly, it’s dominated by either conservatives or anarcho-capitalists, rarely seeing a ML on there. I think this can be improved a lot upon, because Marxists have missed this opportunity to radicalize people in the “Small Web” communities. We need a healthier and better overall version of the Web, and I think it can provide a useful outlet for not only radicalizing new comrades, but educating everyone on technology and how to use it safely and in a healthy manner. If you’re interested in checking out the Small Web movement, check out this manifesto. Gopher and Gemini, being the two most popular non-WWW protocols, are completely dominated by conservatives and such. A ML presence there could help turn the tide in the small/sustainable computing sphere.
I’m also thinking of setting up a mechanism of democratically run services, trying to destroy the “benevolent dictator” mechanism the software administrators have. I’m only aware of one attempt so far at this, here.
Healthy Computing
Speaking of healthy, this could be a potential third project, a mental wellness guide for technology. Of course, with a strong focus on FOSS projects. I think we need better structured resources for people to access, more “polished”, in order to garner attention as viable alternatives to what liberals and conservatives are pushing online. There is a lot of pseudo-science regarding mental health in general, and especially regarding computing, so it could be a fully featured guide to say the least.
This could tie in with other resources written from a ML standpoint for people, perhaps countering the whole “self improvement” movement with diverse explanations and such.
Zine
I think Lemmygrad could publish a Zine. ML-themed findings from the Web, personal essays, stories, and anything fitting. Then it can be easily printed. Monthly releases would be neat. Could also include the news of that month, and so on. Could make a fitting alternative for paid Leftist monthly newspapers and such.
Contributing
I want this to be up for public debate so everyone can contribute with ideas! I’m personally versed in hosting things, but additional help is very much needed. If you want to contribute with an idea, or are skilled in contributing directly to any of these projects, let’s get in touch. Perhaps we could get the Revolutionary Technical Committee involved in this if they’re willing to contribute to a Marxist technological “front”.
What do you think of what I’ve outlined above? Let’s discuss.
Huawei has cloud services which could resolve a lot of these problems if the Lemmygrad community could afford their services. Collectively I have no doubt we could. Hell I could pay for a few of their low end elastic cloud services myself if Lemmygrad resource demands aren’t usually very high.
edit: I’ve calculated the pricing wrong, it was 136$ per month. It’s pricey.
I’m not sure it would be, after all we can access all kinds of websites located outside our respective borders pretty easily and without delay. As long as we pay enough to handle the traffic Lemmygrad usually sees and allow for elasticity to account for higher traffic times and surges of refugees like what happened during the GenZedong shutdown, should be fine for the most part.
EDIT: My content above was responding to what you said prior to the edit, in which you stated there would be a latency issue.
RESPONSE TO YOUR EDIT: $136/month is something I could afford just on my own. If Lemmygrad introduced a donation system then per active member it’d just be a few USD per month per member
Yeah my bad shouldn’t have edited the whole comment out. This is something to figure out, though I’m pretty sure for 130$ you can get a dedi in other places.
Probably, or we didn’t parse through Huawei’s offerings enough to find a more suitable option. If we get input from a Lemmygrad dev about all the needs required to run and/or expand Lemmygrad, it might be easier to find something suitable.
Yeah. I looked at the Elastic Cloud Server one, which seems to me what they call their VPSes.
That’s what I looked at too, but with that price you get a lot of other benefits, such as cyber/DDoS protection, elasticity, DNS, etc
I know, still seems overpriced in my opinion.
Fair enough, either way, cloud is an option and Huawei isn’t the only Chinese provider.