FBXL Social

I've talked a little bit about #JupitersGhost the last few days, but the last time I spent a large amount of time talking about it was ~1 year ago, and I have about twice as many followers now as I did then, which means it's time to talk about Jupiter's Ghost some more.

#JG is a podcast set in the collaborative, crowd sourced, creative commons licensed universe of the Solar Federation.

You can listen to it at https://intergalactic.computer

Intergalactic.computer is a social network (currently powered by Buddypress, unfortunately) that we use to organize the Jupiter's Ghost podcast.

But The Solar Federation and Intergalactic Computer can be a lot more than that.

@ajroach42
> Intergalactic.computer is a social network

Awesome, will check it out.

> currently powered by Buddypress, unfortunately

Why is that unfortunate?

Is it about the current lack of interop with the fediverse? Couldn't you make a BuddyPress server into a fediverse server by adding the ActivityPub for WordPress plug-in?

Some tweaking of one or the other might be required, but BP devs will need guidance on the UX goals;

https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8931

#BuddyPress #ActivityPub

(This is going to be a long thread, with some philosophical musings about the nature of creativity and copyright, and a lot of background in to what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and if that kind of thing doesn't appeal to you you should probably stick a 1 day mute on me.)

Alright! First things first, What is Jupiter's Ghost?

Jupiter's Ghost is a space ship operated by the space corps on the outskirts of a crumbling intergalactic utopia.

The space corps is an organization that exists on the edges of the Solar Federation, picking up the pieces that the federation drops. They do mutual aid. They run supplies and rescue people after natural disasters, they explore and document what they find, occasionally they do mutual defense.

Think Starfleet, without the monopoly of violence.

The Solar Federation is a fractured utopia. Even if it was ever a wonderful place, it isn't anymore. Everyone has enough to eat, but a lot of people are still just barely getting by for one reason or another.

I recorded a log entry about this: https://intergalactic.computer/social/podcast/personal-log-james-andrews/

(that log wasn't working. It was a fedi-ddos)

I've written a lot about what Jupiter's Ghost and the Solar Federation are supposed to be.

I don't have to do that again.

https://intergalactic.computer/social/about-jupiters-ghost-and-the-solar-federation/

I'll excerpt some quotes in the next post.

"Intergalactic Social is a collaborative fiction site detailing the lives and daily operations of people living in the Solar Federation and the United Worlds. At the moment, it is the central hub of the Solar Federation Universe, and the forum through which all major contributions to the story are organized.

Intergalactic Social is an in-character social network and forum in which the various inhabitants of the Solar Federation Universe can interact. All content is available CC-BY-SA."

From the How To Contribute section: https://intergalactic.computer/social/how-to-contribute/

The podcasts specifically follow this structure:

- The setting runner posts (part or all of) an official mission log, detailing the Big Event that makes up the A plot of a given episode.

- The crew/inhabitants of that setting have a set amount of time to write/record their personal logs.
- - They can collaborate with one another or work solo.
- - They can use the social network to post updates that other people can reference within their updates, if they’d like.
- - These personal logs can be part of the A plot, or can make up B and C plots.

- The setting runner collects all of the personal logs, makes any additions they want to the official mission logs, and cuts together an episode.
- - Not every personal log will be included in the finished episode (this is due to time considerations) but most or all of them will be included in the personal log feed for that setting, and the personal log feed for the universe overall.

Also from How to contribute:

That last bit might not make sense if you aren’t familiar with the structure of our podcasts.

There are several:

- One ‘official’ podcast per setting, which is the episode described above

- One ‘unfiltered’ podcast per setting, which is every personal log, including the full versions of logs that were cut short for the episode and logs that weren’t included in the episode

- One podcast feed which is all the official episodes across the whole universe

- One podcast feed that is every log from every setting across the whole universe. (This isn’t very large right now, but it is my hope that eventually there is so much in the full feed that it’s basically impossible for one person to listen to all of it.)

And from the "settings" page:

https://intergalactic.computer/social/ships-and-settings/

Ships, planets, space stations, and other settlements make up the settings by which the solar federation universe is organized (by analogy with some popular science fiction TV shows, Enterprise, Deep Space 9, and Voyager shared a universe but each told their own stories with only occasional overlap. Settings in The solar federation will often be organized the same way. This mostly matters for the podcast(s), which we’ll talk about bellow.)

Also from the How to Contribute page is this bit about the license:

In order for this kind of a collaboration to work, we all have to agree on the terms through which the things we produce are distributed. This means that we need to pick a license. Intergalactic Social and Jupiter’s Ghost are available under a Creative Commons – BY-SA license.

When you upload content to the site, you are agreeing to make it available under the same license. This means that people can remix your content, as long as they attribute it back to you, and as long as they use the same (or a compatible) license for their work.

This also means that people outside of Intergalactic Social can use your content, and those people may or may not choose to follow Rule #1 above. That’s the nature of open content and collaborative fiction, and I want to make sure you’re aware of it before you contribute.

[Rule #1 says: Do not tell stories involving other users without their consent.

This is really simple. You have autonomy over your character, and they have autonomy over their character. If you need someone in your story, feel free to reach out to them, or just create an NPC. ]

and here is where I'll stop pasting in bits from things I wrote several years ago and start saying some new stuff.

I picked a CC-BY-SA license for the same reason I frequently pick copyleft licenses when I'm working on software.

I could have gone with CC-BY or a public domain dedication, but if I release something CC-BY and you (or Disney!) decide to remix it, you can! And you can sell it! And you own the copyright on it! and it is effectively locked up. The commons shrinks.

If I release something CC-BY-SA and you (or Disney) decide to remix it, you can! And you can sell it! And you own the copyright on it! But you have to release your remix, your derivative work, your transformation or creative re-use under identical/ compatible terms. The commons grows.

For those same reasons, I didn't go with an "ND" license. What we are doing is one giant derivative work. ND is actively harmful to that.

And I didn't go with an "NC" or "Non-commercial" license because I am absolutely going to run ads in the zine, and sell sponsorships on the podcast, and run the cartoon made from the podcast on New Ellijay Television ( https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/hx7PGjW5YqTG8c6q4nrD7R ) , along side occasional advertisements.

I am exploiting this thing commercially, so that I can fund continuing to make it, so that I can pay the people who are involved in making it, etc.

If you can come up with a way to make money on Jupiter's Ghost, Do it! Grow the audience.

As an aside: the cartoon we did ( https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/hx7PGjW5YqTG8c6q4nrD7R ) is basically what I would consider the minimum viable cartoon.

I'd really love to do a better one. I did it myself, I'm not good at that kind of thing. I'd love to hire someone to do a better job!

So why? Why am I putting energy in to this?

Well, honestly, it's about Star Trek New Voyages/Phase II/Star Trek Continues/Starship Farragut/ etc.

It's about fanfiction.

Which means I need to talk about Fanfiction.

We'll start with Starship Farragut (the animated series):

https://www.yewtu.be/watch?v=ieNz06w9tN8

And the live action series: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=-ZpVMDJrT20

And New Voyages/Phase II:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=uybWdnrcvps&list=PL5h4ur_aSq8NxKIK0TWk6puXu4E1RjT8y&index=7

And "Continues":

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=3G-ziTBAkbQ

These fan productions vary wildly in quality, even within themselves, but they are all entertaining and some of them (New Voyages' Blood and Fire, for example) represent some of the best Star Trek to every Trek the Stars.

Basically one thing unifies all these shows, and that is that they are no longer producing regular episodes, because Paramount decided that they were no longer going to tolerate a star trek fan film.

When you're producing something using someone else's IP, you are either doing it: With their permission, without their knowledge, or illegally.

In the early days of Star Trek fan films (and Star Wars! See A light in the darkness: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=wECZUuSgysk or Pink Five: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8Z5t7HAE_Kw or a dozen other Star Wars Fan films) this kind of thing was either explicitly endorsed or at least begrudgingly tolerated.

But, as technology improved, and more prominent actors got involved and the quality of Fan Productions began to approach something that could compete with Paramount or Lucasfilms, they pulled the plug.

So, what happens when you build a universe in which you can tell Star Wars-y stories or Star Trek-y stories or Expanse-y stories that is explicitly licensed in a way that encourages fan productions, remixes, re-use (and, most importantly, mandates that future contributes Expand the commons!)?

That's what I hope to find out with the solar federation, #JupitersGhost and even #SEFGW (that is The Space Explorers Field Guide Wiki, another thing that will see the light of day once #JG is more self sustaining.)

I suspect that what happens is that we release a podcast about people in space for a while and not much else, and then maybe the thing grows some legs? Who knows!

There is historical precedence for this kind of work. The Backrooms, the SCP wiki, any number of role playing forums over the years, etc.

But I've never found one that was explicit in it's goal to become a world in which people could tell their own stories, and that's what I'm about.

I would prefer to see a world with significant copyright reform.

Until such time as that happens, I'll accept lots of people working together to produce things outside the structure of existing copyrights, and in a way that renders the existing structure powerless.

So that takes us back to Jupiter's Ghost and the Solar Federation.

We have two podcasts feeds right now: Jupiter's Ghost official and Jupiter's Ghost unfiltered: https://intergalactic.computer/social/podcasts/

We have a social network that barely functions and some forums that sort of work: https://intergalactic.computer/social/

We have a chat room in element that doesn't see much use, but is fully functional.

And we have *me* sitting here wondering what the best path forward is to make it easier for our existing collaborators to participate, and to make it easier for new collaborators to join.

What we have Works! It works pretty well, with some drawbacks, but it is very Human Powered (that's fine!) and a little overly complicated (that's less fine!) and pretty fragile (That's bad!)

As has been made clear elsewhere, I have some peculiar ideas about computers and their capacity for bringing people together.

I'm thinking about where to go from here.

I could soup up the wordpress/buddypress/bbpress setup that we have, write a couple of shims to shunt data back and forth. I could probably come up with some kind of Wiki plugin for wordpress too.

Wordpress is a swiss army knife. It'll do anything, poorly, but it'll do anything.

I could adapt our workflows and make some modifications to the existing tooling and move us to more powerful hardware and just generally make the site as good as it can be with the foundation that it is based on. I could spend a few weeks just hotrodding the fuck out of this wordpress site, and it would be good enough.

It wouldn't be good, but it would be good enough. Less fragile, less manual, less complicated. (but still somewhat fragile, manual, and complicated.)

The bigger problem, though, is that wordpress is just too good of a target for spammers and scammers. I get a million emails every week on the contact form, and they're all spam bullshit.

I need a way for people to Join Up that has some bumps. This is human scale. I want a human to have to interact with them. Email is the obvious way to do this, but it Sucks.

I could make folks sign up via Matrix/element, but that sounds like a *huge* barrier to entry for folks who aren't already participating, and there are *no* mechanisms there to prevent it from eventually being overrun with spam too.

But Wordpress is easy for people who aren't me to administer! and it's got a fairly robust permissions system! and it can do whatever bullshit I decide it needs to do that week. So we're still using wordpress for now, and I don't think we're going to *stop* using wordpress, but I think we might *start* using something in addition to wordpress.

One of the things I'm considering is setting up a tilde, a pubnix, a linux computer upon which people can register accounts and access a shell.

(Talk about barrier to entry!)

but the reason I'm considering this isn't for the shell so much as it is for all the things I can enable through that shell.

Any given user might never need to actually ssh in. Fill out a web form to create your account. An admin comes along eventually and approves it and sends you a welcome email with info on how to connect from your phone to our email servers, our chat rooms, etc.

All access is controlled via your shell account. If you do SSH in, you get mutt and irssi and [insert other software here] and if you don't ssh in, you get your phone or desktop email client, the chat app of your choice, etc. etc.

I think it would be neat to do all of this with a tilde!

It is slightly more complicated than "sign up for an account and start posting" but it is also significantly easier for me to manage, and frankly more generally robust.

The wordpress site doesn't have to go away, even. I can write some shims up so that folks can ldap/sso in with their shell creds, certain kinds of emails also become forum posts (or vice versa).

Maybe the wordpress site hosts a static copy of the wiki that is built from text files stored in a git repo on the server.

But maybe not! Maybe I just need to make the wordpress experience better and move on. (maybe my desire to build a tilde should be brought to fruition elsewhere.)

In the meantime, I think I'm going to update the info on how to request an account to say to send me a DM on the fediverse.

If you'd like to participate in Jupiter's Ghost, the best and only way to get an account right now is to have a conversation with me.

So, if you've read all this and you're thinking, man this #JupitersGhost stuff sounds neat, here is your beacon.

DM Me.

If you've sent an email in the past and it was eaten by the spam machine that is modern wordpress, or you never received a reply because google has marked the rest of our shit as spam? DM me.

If you want an account you can still DM me here, but our official website's pronoun field has kept out anyone who shouldn't register.

So if you'd like to join the crew of the jupiter's ghost, request an account:

https://intergalactic.computer/social/register/

when you account is approved, join the Jupiter's Ghost group:

https://intergalactic.computer/social/groups/jupiters-ghost/

When that is approved, introduce yourself in the forum and join our matrix channel:

https://intergalactic.computer/social/groups/jupiters-ghost/forum/

If you'd like to run a separate setting, do all of those things anyway, and then shoot me a DM here.

@Hyolobrika

We deal with some of that in the first two episodes, and a little more in the supplemental log from J Andrews, but basically:

- The post-capitalist society that the crew is living in was built on the back of authoritarianism and is crumbling at the edges.

- Lots of the crew are still trying to unlearn lots of things, and the whole "kill the cop in your head" thing is intended to be a theme over the first few dozen episodes.

- One of our early contributors wrote the bit about the illegal poker games with a whole mess of stuff about an infestation of capitalist brain worms. It was funny, so I ran with it instead of shutting it down.

- It's a big universe, plenty of room for other folks to tell other stories.

@ajroach42 I've tried to dive into the corpus a few times, but mostly bounced due to the 40+ hour backlog of podcast backlog.

I should build a Jupiter's Ghost RPG as a way of tricking my brain into priorities

@silverwizard I'd love that.

There are posted transcripts for the two main episodes if that'd be easier, and a mediocre cartoon.

@silverwizard I understood. I was offering the transcripts as an alternative.