Entering this space | the whys, whats and hows
journeying through the Tech industy >.<
So the past 6 years (sheesh) I've worked in the Tech industry from product manager to recruiter, I've become very well versed in what this industry is made of. And I can definitively say.. i didn't like what i saw. Egos and profit-driven mentalities led to ineffienient, insecure and resultingly, unsafe product that companies i've worked for built for their customers. that alone made me curious about all of the platforms I utilize in the digital realm.
pandemics
them boom, the pandemic started, lockdown happened and my entire world changed. working from home full-time completely changed the way I interacted with my dreams, my body, my politics and my relationships. so many of us were driven to the ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ̀ˋ ɪɴᴛᴇʀɴᴇᴛ to work and relate and tbh.. i really loved it. I reckoned with the fact that, at heart, I'm a home-body! in that first year, i began to understand that I'm not just an individual, i'm a product of the collective. But when we moved into 2021 and the vaccines rolled out, the world attempted to return to pre-2020 lifestyles, but i was pretty set on grappling with the moving through an ongoing pandemic. the realm in which my relationships lived felt like traveling between 2 dimensions: one in which covid is a blip in our history and one in which it continues to be a catalyst for the apocalypse (read the Parable series by Octavia Butler). The consequences of this?
web 3 rabbit hole
^ yea, that happened. and i would have never known that this basically exists w/o the capitalist incentives if not for samara (thank you ♥) via the fediverse. all i knew was that it offered an alternative to the metas and the x's (fka twitter) that marketed autonomy, ownership and privacy.
and that's what sold me, it's what started the seeds of wanting to curate a digital space for / with my friends. a couple years later and I'm learning more about the true meaning of decentralization. and i started to conjure a concept in my head of what this may look like for my community: digital villages. the rabbit hole shifted and i dug deeper into research to shape this idea, and I ended up getting funded to pursue it. straight from my proposal, here's the idea:
The Digital Village is the digital manifestation of the connections + relationships we maintain in the physical realm. We are taking lessons from the realities of and responses to the pandemic. sometimes, it is inconvenient and unsafe to be together in person, but there is still desire to remain connected. Creating a platform that addresses this need while remaining as independent as possible from the digital-capitalist and digital-fascist supply chain is essential to our our collective survival.
The Digital Village seeks to operate outside the larger digital world as a means of protecting our privacy, practicing hyper-local community building and move beyond digital spectacle as a means of surviving capitalism and fascism. As such, this project explores decentralization of digital platforms, utilizing private and secure digital resources, federated social networking, peer2peer platforms and practices in an attempt to disrupt the digital-capitalist and digital-fascist supply chain to make a lasting impact that disrupts Big Tech, it seeks to operate with the larger digital system by offering research, work, art and Inspiration to those who share similar values systems and are seeking to build their own village and survive the current world.
podmap v1 - who are my people? how do we align on my core values?
but in order to get ^there^, i need to feel grounded in what my community even is. the idea of community has felt so nebulous lately. as an organizer, I hear the word thrown around sooo much (myself included (ง •̀_•́)ง) and i just really wanted some direction as to wth community even is... what community I belonged to. so i did a thing i always heard about in the movement world, but actually never did myself, ~podmapping~
v1 is below:
image of podmapping key outlining the uses of the different kinds of pod circles
Experimenting
buying a raspberry pi!! + the annoyances that came with it
it took me until like the halfway point in class, but after research and doubt and confusion and more research, I decided to physically host my server at my house. i got a raspbery pi (a lil mini computer you plug right into your router) to install yunohost (an operating system that makes self-hosting as easy as possible). looking at my lil baby, i feel proud to have taken the step this journey. holding the hardware in my hand made me feel more empowered and technically capable.
the ~annoying~ part that came with this tho, was being marketed (and buying) a cable that wasn't necessary for setup. so I went to walmart to buy an actual ethernet cable that would let me plug the pi into my router, but it was locked up for "security". A $7 cable! being locked up!! it just felt really goofy to me to be hindered in this way in my very Black community. WHO CARES IF SOMEONE STEALS A $7 CABLE WHEN YALL STEAL FROM PEOPLE EVERY DAY. this conditional caging of tech pissed me off but made me determined as ever to continue on this path.
so i finally had everything i needed to bring my server online. i beeped booped bopped on my computer and just felt so much gratitude that i did the thing. the quetion was... what am I trying to do on this new living thing that I brought into the world. Initially, I wanted to start up a media server, and this whole caging ordeal at walmart made me feel even more indignant about it. because f**k copyright, f**k the crackdowns on password sharing.. the folks who monopolize media barely pay the people who are creating the content. so how can I share art (and thus, a piece of the world) with my community? how can we utilize our funds to tangibly support creators we love and respect? i really wanted to do something with that, but also, i lacked the skills to ensure security and privacy in an industry that can really crack down on us in collaboration with my ISP. so i decided to smart smaller with a personal/communal project... M3dia Club!
M3dia Club is a podcast, sure, but even more so, it’s an audioblog, for me, by me + oftentimes with others. I’m considering this an archive of books, movies, tv shows, video games, articles, all kinds of mixed media that I’ve enjoyed and will continue to enjoy in the years to come. For me, this club is an opportunity to practice intentionality with my consumption and creation of media in a way that pushes me towards a collective vision of the future!
originally, M3dia Club was a personal project for me to be intenional with what media i'm consuming and have intentional reflection/discussion around it to help shape my past, present and future. and it still is that, but interrogating the "solidarity" in Solidarity Infrastructures, made me realize that media and discussion is a huge way that connect with my pods, not just myself or the world at large. so I want this to be communal, a way for us to connect to each other and have fun! so I downloaded Castopod, a federated podcast hosting app on the ActivityPub protocol that turns your podcast into a social media platform. Ideally, folks on Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps can interact with my M3dia Club site without having to download a brand new application (WIP).
...and then I lost my password (╥﹏╥). which honestly, is fine lol. The practice of building, losing, wiping and re-building is a practice in and of itself that I'm grateful for.
ok so now what? | reflections on server building and podmapping
so i've secured the hardware, stood up the server, downloaded the applications, migrated my content... how do i get folks to interact with / migrate to / even just look at m3diaclub.nohost.me? coming into this class, i had a big questions around migration. with so many (including my community!) operating within the walled gardens of Big Social Media, what does it take to get folks to take the leap to something new, somewhere where not too many of us are? in the organizing community, I see the critiques stream in of Elon's takeover of Twitter, concerns of shadowbanning on facebook and instagram... but we are still there (myself included). and this is how I started forming the theory that in my community, it takes a foundation of political alignment and vulnerability in our relationship to migrate together. political alignmet in the sense that we are fed up enough about our current digital platforms that we be moved to action. And vulnerability meaning that we cultivate a space to make mistakes and navigate the uncertainty of new tech together.
returning to my podmap
grounded in this theory, I returned to my podmap to add new layers to my community map
podmap v2 - where are we in the digital realm?
image of version 2 of chelle's podmap
podmap v3 - this isn't just about me, exploring ALL our connections
the inspiration for this podmap version came from this map shown in class, mapping the differences between distributed, decentralized and centralized servers:
i wanted to draw lines of connection between all the pods that have established relationship to each other and see if it looked like any of the above. Below is the result:
seems to be a combination of different kinds of servers!
podmap v3.2 - am i... a server? controlling for political alignment
podmap v3.3 - am i... a server? controlling for vulnerability
podmap v3.4 - am i... a server? controlling for where political alignment and intimacy overlap
To continue thinking on..
maintainence + care
Outsiders sometimes make the mistake of focusing on the rusty bridges and broken pipes — the “defective objects” themselves — whereas local fixers are more concerned with “the social and political relationships in which [those objects are] embedded...
...We should always ask: what, exactly, is being maintained? “Is it the thing itself,” Graham and Thrift ask, “or the negotiated order that surrounds it, or some ‘larger’ entity?” 22 Often the answer is all of the above. Maintenance traverses scales.
by Shannon Mattern
and as a piece of that, load balancing:
A load balancer acts as the “traffic manager” sitting in front of your servers and routing client requests across all servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximizes speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could degrade performance. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer automatically starts to send requests to it.