shy
『she hacked you』 is like a pokèmon, evolving into a larger + more complex community project
How could you possibly be bored at the end of the world?
Climate instability is a small component of impending total cascading ecological collapse.
In academia? Struggling for grants for what? Measuring the collapse in scientific papers that are ignored. Sooo then what?
Unfortunately, SHY is and can not be the solution; realistically, there probably isn't any solution. SHY is not proposing our goal is to fix the world, or stop impending ecological collapse
About Us
A community of scientists, and data shows mostly computer scientists
But also makers, hackers, academics, communists, eco-terrorists, anarchists, nurses, hardware and software engineers, socialists, ecologists, electrical engineers, lawyers, mycologists, programmers, journalists, artists, designers, arsonists, kopimists, nomads, writers, union organizers, educators, witches, musicians, environmentalists, arboreals, activists, narco-terrorists, luddites, night-timers, day-dreamers, exiles, and party-crashers
Ultimately, and Ideally a diverse group of people and skills bound together by similar goals: 1. Participate in a project larger than themselves 2. Collaborate on a project that seeks equitable treatment + dignity for all Terran life
All languages +cultures +nationalities +political-affiliations (including apolitical) +identities +religions +age-group are invited to participate
Unique perspectives divergent opinions presented in good faith are appreciated + will be discussed
Rules
Essentially none; you are free to be stupid, post about anything
SHY seeks to mimic the freedom of expression found on the early internet; but also includes freedom to endlessly ridicule, embarrass, insult, and shame stupid posts; it goes both ways
Preferably, cultivate Interpersonal communication skills, be comfortably wrong, and be able to learn from others
Racist, fascist, + classical to neo nazi- will wish they got banned; instead of consequences like oddly bricked devices Go ahead, post, put all your devices on the line to test if serious.
Origin Story
SHY originally was only free educational computer science courses streamed live weekly; it needed music for the stream, so a music project was created, needing students to avoid an empty stream, a social media presence on Mastodon+Reddit was created and grew rapidly.
Over time, the essence of SHY began to change. Always intended to be nucleation point for a community, but who was in it and shaped it, and so what it means are still open questions: it requires all of us to answer them.
Will this work? Who knows? Probably not, but we can only find out if we try
Contact
The founder and current administrator of the community is Mastodon.social@ekis
Until I regret this decision, anyone can contact directly + immediately via email:
Gladly accept love letters, but not fond of death threats; but don't censor yourself.
Use XMPP? Join our chat [email protected]
Or, Instant Message Ekis [email protected]
Support & Donations
Contributing financial support will speed up growth of this community via paypal or via ko-fi
SHY is already tied to an established CA non-profit with a dedicated bank account. Revenue and donations will be held in a dedicated business account, community audited, and control will rest with the SHY community; it may fund open source projects or other yet undefined community objectives.
Work will begin to convert the organization into a non-profit workers' cooperative; demonstrating how cooperatives can be operated democratically, and without C-Suite executives. Completely worker owned, operated, non-profit cooperative (but we will be designing our own instead of using the new standard California model).
Goal of a non-profit workers cooperative:
- Transparency
- Democracy
- Exerting force within the organizational ecosystem
Creating an organization within the current organizational ecosystem, explicitly with entirely different goals and motives combined with no board of directors, makes our design incredibly efficient by comparison; in addition, willing to lose profit for achieve other goals, will make SHY dangerous entity within the ecosystem*
Bitcoin Donations
Never buy & give them to SHY to sell:
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Give Me Your Coins!
And, of course, you can personally shower me (Ekis) with your cryptocurrency.
Made an obscene amount of money? And you haven't already sent some? I'm offended!
Will even take your esoteric fork-coin; but no regaling me with tales of extraordinary properties. Really don't care-
Interested In Leadership Roles?
SHY is an ambitious project that exist beyond this site; already connected to an established CA non-profit. Members wishing to have democratic control will be required to join the SHY non-profit cooperative.
We are looking for community organizers, and we need department leaders for different types of skills. If you have been doing UX design for a long time, and could help newer people getting into it, we would to hear from you. The same writing (technical writing, but not exclusively), 2D artists, 3D artists, etc. We want find people with talent in each field they can share with others and build "departments"(until we have a better word) around these individuals. They will have weighted voting during decision making votes, not massively but noticeable.
We will be building new federated platforms, while providing fixes for existing ones.
We require modifications to an existing CA non-profit structure; writing new articles of operation, to provide for a unique cooperative structure.
The goal of establishing a entirely worker owned and operated non-profit cooperative is a very rare; it will serve both as a demonstration while empowering the SHY community to be more than bystanders.
We will redefine economic disruption
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This is a very interesting and complex project.
I need to ask you quite a few questions to clarify the goal; I should be able to help even if just for guidance, but likely even for providing code.
Does the database have to be persistent? I was just talking about this with a friend, very similar concept, but our idea was that if you transferred data between nodes then you would essentially get points that you can use to rent space on the database. That way the data is ephemeral, which is useful in some cases, or if you keep a compute transferring you can have permanent storage.
And if the idea takes off even remotely, it would be easy to setup servers to provide transferring, and then use the points gained to subsidize people; so they can more easily store data on the network.
I'm glad you realized its a bad idea to run code on it, in fact I wouldn't allow anything but HTML and CSS; beyond maybe a few basic functions that involved multisngatures for example.
Does it have to be persistent? Because that makes the problem much more difficult, because then you have to store it in a way that either shards so things are duplicated but also hope those duplicates stay online which is not at all guarnateed. And the database would keep growing and compression even zstd would only do so much.
User being able to delete what they add would help, but thinking of it more as rental space on a p2p database might end up being an easier problem.
I will read through it more and see if I can pull out more questions; its a complex idea and I'm honestly in a lot of pain so its hard to read and write ; but I wanted to give you the start of a thoughtful response.
I hope you understand, and I will dive deeper into this with you if you are willing. I just need a little time.
I don't have the headspace to get into actually coding anything right now. I'm trying to stay focused on a few other projects for as long as I can mange.
It also feels like one of those things that so big I'm a little freaked out about event thinking about where to start (and how much work it would be). But, that's never really stopped me before once I've actually gotten started with a thing.
To answer your questions:
Yes. Mostly. Kinda. (If I'm thinking of persistent the correct way) My first thought for this is my notes. I've got like 10K of them and use them all the time. I'd want them to always be hot.
Things like images though probably wouldn't need to be fully online. I'm thinking something like a combination of always available thumbnails and meta-data with a link back to something like Amazon's Deep Glacier (https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/glacier/) where the full assets are stored, but you don't have instant access to them. It would take some about of time to pull them if you needed the full file.
As to it being persistent on any given device, that feels like an implementation detail. Not that that's trivial, it's just that I've been thinking of this from the end-user side, not the builder side. I think the rule of thumb would be "as long as I can get to the stuff I want when I want, I'm good" (though, I do have an inkling of how hard that actually is to pull off, but that's the dream)
A main key to make explicit is that for most of the types of data I'm thinking of they should be permanent (even if not instantly accessible). e.g. If I'm putting my photos in here, they shouldn't disappear unless I delete them
As to storing data on the network specifically, I can totally see that. Kinda a bit torrent style thing but with your own encrypted data blocks (I think someone built something like that before, but I can't remember)
Yeah, I think the separation of concerns is critical. Though, I'm thinking JSONs too. And, really any format folks want to use. The key being it's just text and not executable code. I realize that can open cans of worms, but I'm thinking about the formatting of stuff and how it would work.
For example, if you have a video and you want to create overlays for it with a given style the idea would be to provide a JSON and then whatever the outside rendering engine is would be responsible for doing the work. (and folks could use different rending engines, so, for example, if there's text based stuff, folks could choose to have that overlay the video or kick it to a screen reader so they can hear it)
There would be some non-text data too. e.g. images and videos. But they also wouldn't be executable.
Yeah, I guess at the high level maybe it comes down to literally, it's just storage and there's another layer that is responsible for doing stuff with whatever is being stored.
Storage is a kicker, no doubt. Carrying on from the earlier note, one thing that I've considered is what if Apple could be convinced to come on board. I have this vision of every iDevice being a coordinated node.
This is, of course, pie in the sky, but I'm in "what if" mode
I'm also thinking of this like some of their plans. e.g. you get 5gb free and then it costs a little for more storage.
That's not great, but it might be a start.
In fact, something like making the storage work on whatever your existing phone/cloud/whatever providers free tier is worth strong consideration. Again, not great since it's a limiter to access, but I'm also thinking phase one as well as the end goal
Two other options come to mind: first, convince some rich ass person to setup a foundation for it. No idea how far that would get because my concepts of money break when I start thinking about really rich folks. Math would need to be done
But, more interesting to me is the idea of a government funding. Like, what if we treated this like roads? That would make it super critical that everything be encrypted to hell and back, but that would be the case anyway.
As before, individual governments would have to be convinced but thinking of this on a 100 year timeline could this turn out to be like a drivers license or other gov. issued ID where one of the items that stored in your database is your official gov id?
I've been responding as I'm reading instead of reading the entire thing first. So, just got to the p2p DB part and yeah, that's inline with my thinking for at least part of it lol.
Also, I'd totally consider deletion critical to the mix.
Part of my vision for this is like a notebook (or, really a grimoire, which is what I call my notes).
Folks would be able to put whatever they want in it and they'd be able to rip out and evaporate anything they no longer wanted. (Caveat, of course being that if they published something already copies would likely exist in other places and people's databases)
I appreciate you taking the time and I hope you feel better. And yeah, I'm happy to kick around ideas on this. And, I'm in no rush, this stuff has been bouncing around in my head for a few years now.
I need time to give you a more thoughtful reply but I will, and I'd be willing to help code a simple spec to at least get the ball rolling.