sgbase.org

TL;DR - Beta testing private Slack-like chat and video conferencing. If you’re interested in taking part in this beta phase, email me at thalios [at] thalios [dot] org. I’ll get back to you with some rules and a registration link.

Build your own.

It’s something we in the SG community have heard a lot. Some of us have done it. Many of us are trying. We’ve also talked about leaving big tech and trying to use the alternatives. Often we don’t trust the alternative. Or we do, but time and again we discover the alternative is just the another level of gatekeeping, degeneracy, and censorship.

I’ve preached “build your own” and “get off big tech” a lot over the years and I do my best to walk the talk. I’ve hosted my own email/domains for over two decades. I run an alternative OS on my phone (but… it’s a Google Pixel). I haven’t had Windows or Apple on any of my personal tech for a few years now. I roll my own when I can — almost always at the cost of my time and a lack of usability/feature set of the thing.

Building your own isn’t easy. Whether it’s a garden, a charity, a church, or an internet service, it takes time, focus, and the necessary skills. Sometimes you have the skills. Sometimes you need to learn. All too often though, finding the time and focus is the most difficult of hurdles. Clown world has seen fit to give me a bit of time.

So what the heck is SGBase?

I’ve watched groups of people (myself included) in the SG Community come together remotely to do various things related to building your own — planning meet ups, organizing projects, discussing business, and even just getting together on video chat to fight off the loneliness of clown world. This is wonderful and exactly why I love being a part of SG so much. But we almost always end up on big tech platforms to do these things.

That got me to thinking. Could I build a platform that would provide the community an alternative for the basics of collaboration (media-rich chat and audio/video conferencing)? So I got to reading, building, testing, rebuilding, etc. until I am now able to offer the following for a limited number of beta users.

sgbase.org

SGBase - A home base for SGers for when the conversation moves beyond the limits of social media. The tag line I came up with is “For SGers. By SGers.”, but I’m the only SGer running the show at the moment. If this gets legs and people find utility in it, I hope to change that.

SGBase is primarily two services (three if you include central auth).

chat.sgbase.org

This is an implementation of Zulip. A couple of bots are in place to update the notifications stream (McNeicements) for community related events. These events include things like new blog posts to Vox Popoli and other community blogs as well as new Darkstream episodes becoming available (disabled for now). I hope to get one stream linked with deplora.net IRC soon.

meet.sgbase.org

This is Jitsi. Video isn’t easy, but Jitsi makes it a little easier. There is still quite a bit of work needed to make things more stable, but it’s working pretty well right now. However, bandwidth is a concern in the beta testing phase, so the video quality has been limited somewhat. It still looks pretty good though. NOTE: Neither the SDL nor President Trump have used this service… yet.

Two additional services exist, but haven’t had nearly as much attention.

write.sgbase.org

This is a collaborative document creation tool called etherpad. Write documents in real-time together. I’ve integrated this with Jitsi. Some of us have already used this to take notes during calls.

share.sgbase.org

This is FileShelter. A basic file sharing tool that providers for expiration dates and password protection.

If this beta succeeds, I plan to enlist some help and open it up to the entire community. Doing this will likely require a right sizing of the tech, implementing some anti-fragility, and donations to pay for things (tech and labor). If it REALLY takes off, then almost certainly a paywall will go up. The cult of free has no home here.

If you’re interested in taking part in this beta, please drop an email to thalios [at] thalios [dot] org. I’ll send you some rules and a registration link.

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