The Internet, in the perception of modern people, is a set of well-known platforms: several social networks, three or four instant messengers, government services and Avito. Before the mass exodus to social networks (2008-2012 AD), offline blogs existed everywhere - independent corners of the World Wide Web, where people read each other's motley sites and constantly wandered through links in search of new Internet neighbors. Now this phenomenon has evolved into public spaces and channels: blogs and bloggers have become concepts from the plane of the same pair of messengers and centralized social networks, where in fact there is no separate life. The global network has centralized in the hands of the owners of large sites.
For everyday leisure activities like cats and car reviews, this model is quite good: it’s easy to post, find and like on a centralized resource, and all “forbidden” content will be filtered out by moderators. But how does a giant centralized platform pay for a free service? Any online resource is not good magic, but someone else’s computer on the Internet, behind which there are administrators and software developers. At whose expense are we feasting and what is the price? As you know: whoever pays orders the song. If users don’t pay, what kind of music is playing in the offices of Google, Vk, Telegram and others, who benefit from hundreds of developers with immodest salaries in free service?
Nothing personal, it's business
Each organization has its own rules of ethics, taboo topics, and the ability to block any information. Discussions are allowed only within predetermined limits: users are forced to follow rules that may contradict their internal sentiments. As a result, it is necessary to filter speech for “eloquence”, show feelings that are not there, or hide negativity towards someone (although there is no desire inside to seem like a gentleman), and also comply with copyright and licensing agreements (while being a pirate at heart) . "At least someone will educate you!" - a conventional reader of advanced years will object. Education?.. More like training. Corporate restrictions are based on extreme populism rather than humanitarian considerations. Their goal is to satisfy the majority, retain the audience and increase their capitalization. Significantly worried about blocking scammers, the giant services themselves profile and sell the lives of their users to advertisers and other interested parties, likening a person to a broiler chicken, fattened in a favorable information bubble. There are no beautiful graphic annotations about this on the main pages - only a sea of interesting content and positive emotions.
All existing centralized popular services are legal entities. This is logical, since they employ a lot of people and are full of financial activity. The problem is that this turns a commercial structure into a potential instrument of totalitarian control on the part of the state, which is fraught for those who speak out carelessly not with blocking of the profile, but with a criminal case. Hence, politics is added to the self-censorship from the previous paragraph, which is why even posting cats is safe only as long as it does not diverge from the party line.
The goal of popular social networks is to make money from people, not people as such. All sensitive information, with rare exceptions, will be transferred to third parties in uniform, whose jurisdiction allows them to annoy the provider company in case of refusal. In the context of Russian realities, it is appropriate to mention SORM, which monitors communication networks not only from the outside, but in some cases penetrates data centers at the organizations’ own expense, as a result of which, to obtain information, security forces do not even need an official application to the company’s office or court - tintacles collect possible incriminating evidence automatically and open cases in semi-automatic modes. According to publicly available data, such habits are not alien to foreign guardians of thoughts, for example, union of five/nine/fourteen eyes (EN).
The picture is very frightening, almost fatalistic. Unfortunately, ethical projects from the point of view of civil liberties remain unknown to the target audience due to the information vacuum of any alternative solution due to the phenomenon of “no funding - no advertising - no fame”. Despite this, free resources remain—and, moreover, are developing—on the Internet. Many of them fall into the category of instant messengers and social networks, as well as email, VPN and file hosting providers, and everything else that might come to mind.
I propose to quickly get acquainted with several enthusiasts on whose shoulders lies the initiative and life support of the Internet without corporations, registration by phone number, leaking of our personal data and other things that we hate, but to which we are accustomed. What better way to see the source of life of the independent Internet than the personal beliefs and stories of the administrators of free Internet resources?
404.city
A free messenger that meets modern user requirements is a very difficult task. For more than ten years, it has been in great demand as a replacement for proprietary instant messengers. XMPP/Jabber, for which many clients, protocol extensions and plugins have been implemented that provide end-to-end encryption, file transfer, creation and administration of group chats, and much more in this spirit. XMPP is a client-server protocol, meaning its use requires servers that will register users, store chat history, and generally provide communication with other users and servers.
One of the largest modern XMPP servers is 404.city. It has a permanent online presence of several thousand users and a long history, and also, as experience has shown, a very responsive and friendly admin staff.
The idea was to create a free source of scientific information, a means of sharing knowledge and simply private communication, not contaminated by spy trackers and algorithms that manipulate public consciousness. The idea was to create a virtual city where all users would feel like full participants in the infrastructure.
This explains the idea of the 404.city domain, which suggests an unknown city. The most important thing, despite the question of possible utopianism or too high a bar, is the fact that the project began its actual existence. Despite dreams of something self-written, XMPP was chosen as the main tool. “Developing a cross-platform dream messenger with an acceptable level of usability and placing it on marketplaces costs a lot of money,” complains one of the administrators.
The server was launched in 2015. Everything that the project has achieved now is the merit of a persistent team. There was no large-scale PR, because the coverage of the project in major news publications strongly depends on the financial issue.
Our resource has a large user base thanks to word of mouth and a long lifespan. Several ambitious XMPP projects have come and gone in recent years, and users value stability—confidence in tomorrow’s uptime. The service has many users from all over the world, and is even partially used by several technical schools for internal communication.
Administering 404.city is comparable to managing a website or forum with a large number of people: a constant flow of messages to the support service, technical monitoring of software functionality, protection from spam attacks. If after the update Ejabberd [server software] errors occur, the 404.city command fixes them.
There are dreams of introducing new projects into the infrastructure, but there are currently not enough resources for this. Administrators put everything they can into the XMPP server to ensure that the messenger for thousands of people works stably under any load. We believe that it is better to have one, but high-quality service, than to saddle yourself with an unbearable burden. This will only bring frustration to us and our users..
The main difficulty is the lack of funds and investors to develop the project. Community donations barely cover hosting costs. The creators of the project are mainly people who are interested in software and information technology, but we provide support out of pure enthusiasm and only in our free time from our main work. The ambitions of a virtual dream city, unfortunately, must reckon with the harsh reality and the need to feed yourself and your family.
Despite the difficulties, the guys from 404.city categorically do not consider the possibility of closing the service, since this would not only be their personal capitulation, but undermine the faith in alternative free communications among thousands of their loyal users.
Fediverse
There is an opinion that on the free Internet, which this article is about, there is no place for the usual social networks with news feeds, photographs and memes, but this is not so. Social networks with funny pictures have every right to life, like other Internet habits of people. The main problem lies in the centralization of all popular social networks, the main consequences of which were mentioned at the beginning.
"Man is a social animal." These words begin a large podcast about a decentralized social network Fediverse. It is Fediverse that today is a promising alternative to the usual Twitter, VKontakte and the like: hundreds and thousands of independent servers are united into one network thanks to a common protocol, giving users the choice of an administrator they trust, or the opportunity to set up their own server, if desired. And all this while maintaining your usual subscriptions and contacts. I recommend checking out this fascinating podcast about the history of Fedivese, if you haven't heard it yet.
Which of the recent teenagers with a craving for computers has not dreamed of their own social network? We can say that the following two heroes realized this dream.
Dr.Quadragon
So, I’ve been an IT specialist for as long as I can remember, and I remember myself from the age of six, when the first computer appeared at home. The computer is a magical machine that can do ANYTHING, and is an extension of me. It’s good with him, bad without him.
The first quasi-Unix (BeOS) - at the age of 12, 2002. I learned about it from the masterpiece magazine "Hacker", which seemed to be written for me. After that I was carried away by various distribution kits. By the age of 16 or 17, I removed Windows from all the machines in the house, simply because Linux simply worked better.
On the Internet - since 2001. Before that - a little Fido. If a computer can do ANYTHING, then the Internet, being the sum of all computers, can do ANYTHING AT ALL - simply because computers can be connected, and this is potentially the most powerful democratizing force. EVERYONE should have this thing, and EVERYONE should have the right to participate in it. For me by 2004 this was already absolutely clear and was not discussed.
My first blogging experience was LiveJournal, but something didn’t go very well there. The liveinternet.ru platform became my home in 2007. Next - more communities. Antifa, anarchist chat, imageboards, gathering people to organize online raids. Some of them were embarrassing, but I wasn’t in a very good mental state at the time. Anonymous, the Chanology project, other Anon initiatives - I’m never ashamed of this. It was cool. The Internet showed its teeth to a very dangerous enemy and declared itself as a force.
It is likely that this article may fall into the hands of people who are not too familiar with Internet culture and the various manifestations of struggle that are used in it. By “anons,” Doc (a shortened form of the nickname Dr.Quadragon) means Anonymous, an essentially uncontrolled online community that was especially prominent in the second half of the 2000s thanks to protests against totalitarian government and religious organizations, imposing censorship and control. These were spam, DDoS and other types of attacks aimed at disrupting the operation of websites and other network infrastructure. The most recognizable symbol of Anonymous is the Guy Fawkes mask..
Around 2008, I got around to blogging on Wordpress. However, all the time I had the feeling that I was alone in my blog. I had an audience on liveinternet.ru, there were people who subscribed to me. To whom I can and want to tell something. On my solo blog, I actually wrote to nowhere. And this seemed to me an absolutely unfair thing. It turned out that you are either on some platform where everyone is sitting, and you have a point in writing, or you are on your website, which you built with your own hands, and where you diligently do everything yourself, but there is exactly zero sense in writing there. This goes against the democratizing function of the Internet, and instead of empowering everyone, it ends up concentrating power in the hands of platform owners. I do not like it this way. I want to be able to control my digital life.
What if WordPress could communicate with the same servers as email and XMPP do? Then the need for centralized platforms would disappear altogether. I found the Diaspora* project. I contacted its creators - Ilya Zhitomirsky, Max Salzberg, and other guys, and began to bombard them with questions. I really liked the idea of the project - this is exactly what I was looking for. There were attempts to host the Diaspora, but it didn’t work, everything was broken. The idea had to be abandoned. I registered on one of the instances, but I wasn’t interested in living on someone else’s server then.
I didn't know anything about Fediverse. I had to give up searching, but I never forgot the idea, it sank into my subcortex. I only remembered about it around 2016, when I graduated from college. I started looking. Frendika... It's somehow cumbersome. GNU Social is kind of old... There were a number of projects that I had never heard of. I found it strange that the ActivityPub federation protocol that Fediverse is built on is based on HTTP. Compared to XMPP it seemed unreasonably cumbersome. And then I came across some Mastodon. Ruby... Cumbersome, probably. But it seems like nothing, the people who sit there seem to praise me. Microblogging, a new genre for me... Do I want to get involved in this? Oh well, what the hell is not joking with! In April 2017, I registered mastodonsocial.ru and wanted my Mastodon node on some semi-free dead VPS. Which, of course, goes up in smoke after a couple of months. BUT! Over these couple of months, I accumulated a couple of dozen subscribers, and took several people on board! I was already more or less familiar with some of them. But everything broke, and I forgot at work.
I often hear complaints from people who cannot bring their ideas and projects to completion. As history shows, this is an absolutely normal course of development. Some of the plans will certainly sink into oblivion as untenable, but even they provide invaluable experience. The other part of the projects will certainly be resurrected when mistakes are worked out and, possibly, rethought. If Doc's story ended here, she simply wouldn't be here.!
I restarted the project after two to three months on the same domain. I thought one evening: “Hey! And this... worked! Boy, this is what you were looking for! Don’t be greedy about hosting, let’s dive in headfirst! Let’s give corporations some real punk rock! Let’s show the world that that's possible too!"
Which is what I did. I created a separate virtual machine on my German server, installed Mastodon there, and decided - go ahead, let's see how much I have enough and how dedicated I am to my ideas.
And then, suddenly, someone writes to my instance. But not from Mastodon, but from some other engine. And... I just get confused. It blew my mind. It turns out - IT TURNS OUT!!! - other servers may be compatible with Mastodon. This is not about communication between Mastodon servers, but about communication between my Mastodon and projects on other engines. WHAT'S HAPPENING, HOW WAS IT PASSING PAST ME? I started digging. And I learned so many amazing things that I decided to make a small history podcast [the same one that was mentioned just above].
In about two years I will find out that now domains
.rucan be taken away out of court, and I’m arranging a vote for a new domain name. Wins mastodon.ml. Soon I launch a new instance, give people a link and freeze the old one. Well, the rest is history....
Like everyone else, I sometimes get stuck in my projects and ideas - stagnation and depression set in. Perhaps the source of inspiration is one of the key goals of this article. Doc's passionate enthusiasm is worthy of respect; stories like this are the best impetus for action..
I am driven by anarchism. I love watching someone very big and powerful suddenly find himself naked and defenseless in front of millions of people. How vertical power structures are collapsing. I'm a very techno-optimistic dude and I believe that while technology itself doesn't always solve social problems, it does help a hell of a lot. The printing press destroyed the clergy's monopoly on knowledge. The computer has destroyed the monopoly in the media: now everyone can create their own publication, their own radio station and even television if they wish. The monopoly on social networks must also be destroyed at all costs, and their owners must be shown as the “naked kings” that they are. And this can only be done in one way - by logically ending the Internet and showing that anyone can create a social network on their knees, and it will work no worse than what was done by some billionaires for a lot of money. We need people to finally understand — THEY WE DON'T NEED IT, THEY NEED US. In my Fediverse History there is a key phrase - “it turns out you can".
For now, this is the domain of hobbyists, but I see a future where hosting your own Fediverse server will become a common practice for organizations and communities that have, for example, their own websites. My idea is to promote this to universities and educational institutions, and if anyone has ideas for something similar, I would like to discuss it. Independent sites are absolutely necessary, because “dependent” sites have shown their insolvency, and the further it goes, the worse it will be. And the worse it is for them, the better it is for us. Fuck them all, Abdul, set them on fire.
After February 2022, Doc, as a citizen of the Russian Federation, had natural difficulties paying for foreign hosting. At first, he switched to paying with funds from foreign donors, but then a hosting provider (also foreign) was found, which donated its capacity in the name of the life of a large node of a decentralized social network, which indirectly got into the sanctions mess. Free decentralized projects are not self-isolation in small communities. This is about real unification.
A public server involves not only maintenance tasks, but also administrative issues so that the server does not turn into a den of trolls and lovers of unethical pornography. In this, Doc admits, several people help him on a completely voluntary basis, relieving him of most of the burden. If you are not a system administrator by vocation, think that maybe you are a worthy moderator. A moderator on such a resource is not at all about the vertical of power or VIP status, but about maintaining order among equals who are free to easily change the server in the event of unjustified repression.
Tolstoevsky
I was born into the family of an engineer and a doctor, and my dad, a radio engineer, assembled Soviet Spectrum clones using dendrofecal engineering. Not that for sale - Just for fun, as they say.
Around the age of 6 I was allowed to play games, and around 9-10 I was allowed to read a book on BASIC. As a result of this destructive impact on the children's psyche, the madness was formed in an engineering way, although with reservations, which are discussed below.
In high school, I successfully mastered violent actions against Windows systems (3.1, 95, 98), expressed, for example, in the fact that on my home computer - Oh, it was a great machine! 486DX2 66MHz, overclocked to 80 (without a cooler or even a radiator - the case was horizontal, so the percentage was cooled simply by a glass of water placed directly on the “pebble”) - Win95 occupied almost half of the space allotted to it by the manufacturer and performed the same in benchmarks but a virgin one, installed by my friend (who has rich parents and the latest Pentium at that time with a processor with a clock frequency of 100 MHz). Fuck knows why, but at that moment I managed not to realize that this, in fact, is a ready-made profession of a system administrator, and for some reason I was sure that I would become a programmer...
For me personally, he is known as the administrator node Fediverse, which I use, and an avid small web lover who loves text sheets more than pretty pictures. His story (and even in his manner!) is a lamp and living monument to the free RuNet.
Having suffered enough at school, I rushed to the local university to major in “Applied Mathematics and Computer Science”, from where I crashed two years later straight into the army, because I realized that programming, and especially mathematics, was not my thing at all..
Since, in parallel with the simulation of training, I simulated work as a laboratory assistant at a local research institute, after the army, using old connections, I decided to restore my brains. I went to work as a “technician” (read: enikey and installer) at the Polytechnic University, while at the same time studying on a correspondence basis to become a PR specialist (sic!). This time I learned. By the time I received my PR diploma, I was already a system administrator at a bank, and that’s when everything started to happen...
I'm lying. It was in the process of working at the Polytechnic that everything started to turn around. One day I got sick of the fact that I, so smart, modest and handsome, was pulling wires and showing enikey in Windows to accountants, and in interesting places like the server room something incomprehensible and mysterious was spinning. And I got to the bottom of the boss: “Nashchalnik, give a friend a system to try! I’m tired of Windows, I can’t save him, I’m even drinking not out of natural inclination, but out of inescapable grief!” The boss gave me a FreeBSD disk, and my stepfather (my dad had been replaced a long time ago by that time) found a book on this system. And this is where things really started to go wrong! After a week or two of intense techno-porn, red eyes and hair being pulled out in unexpected places, I came to the realization of three simple truths:
1. This shit works;
2. This shit works FAST;
3. This crap does what and only what I need.!
Needless to say, I haven’t returned to Windows since then.?..
I apologize if artistic distortions of grammar seem inappropriate to you, but I didn’t dare to edit Tolstoyevsky’s original texts: the introduction to FreeBSD is described so vividly that you want to log in as root using a vintage keyboard.
Having mastered the freeware [popular name for FreeBSD], I took up what was running on the Polytechnic servers, and it turned out, of course, to be Linux. To be precise, Slackware 10.2 is my first and true (sorry, wives) love. After FreeBSD, mastering it was not difficult. Having gained experience and restored the functioning of the interaural nerve node after the army (just under two years), I went to work in the bank, which I already mentioned above, where they did pay some money, which made it possible not only to drink, but also something for the soul do.
Expectedly hooked by that time on the idea of Free Software, I was looking for alternatives and replacements for everything corporate. Cheap VPS became available to me and turned into a field of experimentation - fortunately, I had some experience in deploying services “for my uncle.” Their own mail, blog (at first on WordPress) and even (after some time) OwnCloud found their first incarnation.
Further searches quite naturally led me to alternative social networks. At first it was Juick - a brilliant microblogging service at that time, managed using Jabber (hence the name - Jabber + Quick). After Anton, the creator of the service, first became Antonina, and then went to Thailand as a cuckoo, I rushed to the clones created by the former inhabitants of Zhuik - BNW and Point, but it quickly became dull there and I discovered the Federation.
First there was GNU Social, after which I was finally brought to Diaspora*. Ilya [the developer] was already hopelessly dead at that time, but the project was still alive and developing. And it completely charmed me - and, first of all, not with the chic idea “let’s let the social network work federally, like email,” but with its inhabitants - the percentage of people who were completely interesting was simply off the charts compared to any centralized products. I was completely sucked in. And then I finally decided to start my own server - that’s how phreedom.tk was born.
After a while, I became disillusioned with the Diaspora - expansion stopped and development slowed down. The ActivityPub protocol, which began to gain strength, was completely ignored by the developers, the community thinned out and became rotten...
And then Evgen came with his Mastodon. Everything about Mastodon fascinated me - the speed, the design, and, of course, the community. Yes, again, people come first. In the Diaspora, these were personalities like Rami Rosenfeld, and here I came across Doc - his enthusiasm was so infectious that after hanging out on his server (and in the process realizing that this was not just a distributed network, but a network of distributed - DIFFERENT - social networks, which simply tore my brain with orgasmic ecstasy) after a while, I raised my node and, inspired by the site switching.social, I recorded what you can now see on fedi.life.
Initially I thought about just making a translation of the original on fedi.life, but the idea changed along the way. Moreover, this was initially the fruit of collective work - a large number of people took part, I mainly translated and wrote the texts, the rest diligently directed, reworked and corrected, giving a breakthrough of ideas on design and structure. The original text was mercilessly mangled and shortened so that the brain raped by Twitter was able to perceive what we were trying to convey (said, a lover of text sheets, approx. acetone). I think it turned out well.
Mastodon, as the same Doc aptly put it, turned out to be an excellent product (due to which it gained popularity), but is a rather lousy program. I, who by that time had seriously immersed myself in the topic of minimalism, began to search again. Mastodon was eating up the resources of virtual machines and S3 storage, which were then expensive for me, and the interface was “heavy”, so the choice fell on Pleroma. At the same time, I decided to promote simple and lightweight services. Thus was born phreedom.club.
Everything was going great—additional services and increasingly lightweight frontends were being deployed. Along the way I discovered Gemini and this became another love - easy in terms of resources and development, by definition a niche and uninteresting tool for corporations, could not help but attract interesting people (and people are the essence of any community for me, as I think you guessed). Played a significant role in my involvement in SmolNet (the minimalist movement of which Gemini is a part) rawtext.club from supporters of Smolnet and the Slow Movement, made very well and elegantly. I gained a huge amount of information and inspiration from there..
In the process of simplification (and, of course, enthusiastic propaganda on my part of a minimalist approach in the digital sphere), Pleroma (soc.phreedom.club) suddenly died (having lived for a little less than two years) - the developers began some strange movements and recent releases began to behave worse and worse, until I was faced with the impossibility of restoring the database (because the only backup turned out to be unsuitable for restoration). Instead I deployed Misskey (mk.phreedom.club), which, from the user’s point of view, goes against the ideology of minimalism - the interface is very cumbersome and in places openly overloaded (from the admin’s point of view, by the way, on the contrary, it is an extremely simple and energy-gluttonous tool), which somewhat violated my principles. But what we have, we have. Evolution, sir. Perhaps there will be an easy interface for Misskey soon.
I would like to note the presence of not only naked enthusiasm, but also life-affirming beliefs: love and respect for people, freedom of thought and speech. Could Tolstoevsky have been developing his projects for years if he had been interested only in technology, excluding from the context the people for whom they were created? I guess not. Altruism is a characteristic feature of many people in the free technology environment. This spirit of humanity is what I mean when I say that in free technologies I see not a party of freaks, but the sweetest community of real people. Yes, there are toxic characters, but I’m sure they also have something more than just a desire to assert themselves by participating in a socially significant project.
As I have already mentioned more than once, people are the basis. Community means interaction. I, being a pronounced introvert, strive to do a lot on my own, but, not being a social phobe, I do it not only for myself - the usefulness of a person’s actions for others is, perhaps, the key point. This is not about trying to “satisfy the consumer,” of course. Sticking to your line is important; this is what determines development. But it’s not good to pupate in your own little world, turning into mud like the developers of the Diaspora.
Ideology, beliefs, political and sexual orientation are tinsel. What matters is being ideological, not being ideological. The idea driving my actions is extremely simple - people should decide, and people should decide for themselves. It’s a MUST to support those who can’t cope, don’t know how, are too stupid or lazy. But only in the “give a fishing rod and instructions for it, and some fish for the first time” mode. Where you sign me up - libertarians, socialists, or communists - is up to you. I don’t have “firm convictions.” I will only say with conviction that the system now, in all spheres without exception, is designed to turn a person into an amoeba - a consumer incapable of making truly independent decisions and demonstrating individuality (the natural desire of an individual to be an individual has long been firmly saddled by the industry of standard goods for non-people). All). And this system needs to be changed.
Postscript I wish every reader to get acquainted with the projects SmolNet, Small Web, Trivial Technologies and Slow Movement.
Darknet
Overlay networks aimed at user anonymity are called hidden networks. Most often, the term darknet is used to generally refer to such technologies, with which I do not entirely agree, as already mentioned wrote, since the image of a mysterious criminal is not exactly what you will find in hidden networks. However, the word has already taken root and there is no point in arguing with it..
Multiple intranet resource administrators I2P agreed to participate in this article. Without them, the material about the spirit of free communications would be completely incomplete. Even if you have never used I2P and do not intend to do so in the future, their stories will be useful for general knowledge.
Postman
Postman, in Russian - Postman, without exaggeration, one of the oldest active participants in the I2P community. Two popular services are based on his care.
The first is email mail.i2p with the ability to send letters from a hidden network to the clearnet (i.e., to the regular Internet) and also receive letters both from other users of the hidden service and from subscribers from the clearnet. In particular, I use this service in my journalistic and semi-journalistic activities. A separate article has been written about mail.i2p the note.
The second service is a torrent tracker, which was also mentioned in one of the previous articles about anonymous file sharing based on the BitTorrent protocol. This is the first and most active torrent tracker of the network to this day, where new distributions appear daily.
The critical infrastructure of the TOR network, which is highly centralized in its architecture, is maintained by officials such as research institutes in the United States and Europe. When I first learned about the I2P mail service, I thought that this was also something official and might even exist with funds from the State Department. It turned out not. Moreover, the service rests on the shoulders of only one enthusiast.
When I first heard about I2P, it was nowhere near what it is today. I was interested in the potential of the project, but I was not a programmer, let alone sufficiently proficient in Java to join the development. I had some programming experience, as I was an avid computer nerd at the time, but administration became my calling.
At that time, the network did not offer any real infrastructure services, and I realized that there was room to roam around here. In 2003 (was it really that long ago!) I contacted the main developer (jrandom at that time) and proposed an email service to the community, which was subsequently warmly received. The result was the first version of i2pmail. Later, gateways to the outside world were added, the service became semi-official and provided a stable bridge between the clearnet and I2P in terms of mail. I then created an IRC server, which eventually became known as IRC2P, where development discussions and casual conversations take place.
The torrent tracker began its work based on the corrected bytemonsoon, capable of working with I2P addresses instead of real IPs. It quickly became apparent that BitTorrent was a major contributor to the growth of the I2P user base. Frustrated by bytemonsoon's meager functionality, I started working on PaTracker in 2007, which became the service known today as tracker2. After all, I am a programmer when circumstances force me to do so..
My philosophy has always been that everyone can contribute to the development of the network. Anyone with a few dollars in their hands and an idea in their head can offer a service that will be used. I2P is not of interest to commercial companies, everything here is done by enthusiasts for ordinary people, and this is the beauty of the network: “projects of one developer” live and flourish, because you don’t need to be a software architect to launch your blog or music stream! In this regard, I2P is a cozy place that knows how to surprise.
Despite the fact that no one is seriously trying to compete with Postman’s services, negative discussions periodically appear on the Internet that this anonymous person maliciously monopolized communications in a hidden network.
Monopoly was never the goal, and I myself was surprised at how successful the services turned out to be. Most novice administrators are faced with the fact that starting a business is relatively easy, but keeping it afloat is a completely different and very difficult matter! Over the years, I've seen many people come and go, interesting resources developed and abandoned, great ideas pitched and projects left unfinished. This, of course, sometimes makes me sad.
I think this is all part of a special I2P ecosystem. But I'm still here. This is my ongoing contribution to the community. What keeps me going? I guess I'm just too stubborn to stop. As long as there is no one I can pass the baton to, and as long as I can afford the data center costs, I just have to keep going. This is part of my life.
To my question about his attitude to prejudices about the darknet, Postman answered in such a way that I wanted to print out his words and hang them in a frame:
The darknet in the public consciousness is equated with crime and it is unlikely that we will be able to do anything about it. But crime and anonymity are unrelated planes, if you look seriously. By and large, the government does not need transparency, but I2P and similar technologies are not outlawed [in the USA] in order to preserve the face of democracy and love of freedom. In fact, crime exists separately and is always revealed in the same way: money transfers, delivery of physical things, etc. Hidden networks, like the regular Internet or telephony, can be used by anyone for a variety of purposes, but ultimately the darknet is just a tool, like a hammer, saw or walkie-talkie.
Unfortunately, there is much less text from English-speaking people. This is due to my weak communication skills in non-Russian. But the I2P topic will not be left behind thanks to the following person.
R4SAS
Our films about hackers are mostly foreign, so the image of a person rummaging around in technology also fits mainly with his overseas brother. For reference: the word “hacker” is not about “breaking”, but about “hack” or “rummage” in the topic of computer technology. The erroneous stereotype was born due to the literal understanding of the word “hack”. There are literate and ideological people in every corner of the Earth, which is why there are many real hackers among the Russian-speaking population of the planet. I contacted one of them as part of this material.
R4SAS [er four es hey es] (four can be read in English if desired) is a legendary I2P personality, a legend of the Russian-speaking segment at least. Every user who has dealt with i2pd has probably stepped on the friendly soil of this person’s servers, not to mention the fact that R4SAS is actively involved in the development of an I2P router in C++. Therefore, if online services were not touched, then its code was definitely executed using i2pd.
Kirill (R4SAS name, possibly not his real name, which he does not hide) supports repositories Purple I2P community (the name of the team leading i2pd) for popular Linux distributions, single-handedly maintains i2pd for Android and, in many ways, for Windows. At the same time, it hosts several online services, starting with PrivateBin And DNS, ending with reg.i2p - a large intranet registrar of short domain names in the zone .i2p under the auspices of Purple I2P.
I have known Kirill virtually for about two years. It is not customary to ask about personal things in anonymous chats, but for this article R4SAS agreed to talk about himself in great detail (as far as possible in his status).
It all started with an interest in computers during my school years. The first one was my parents' computer at work, which ran Win98. Over the years, interest intensified and when the ceiling of mouse driving skills and setting a user password was reached, interest in engineering sciences appeared, especially radio engineering. I started learning how to work with a soldering iron, trying to assemble circuits or even fix some simple (sometimes not so simple) things. Thus, I gained experience working with PC hardware - I learned how to basicly service computers (cleaning, repairing power supplies and motherboards at the level of replacing elements such as capacitors).
One year I became interested in studying Amateur Radio. There were several amateur radio clubs in my city, and I started going to one of them at my own discretion. I was drawn to radio equipment, feeders, antennas. And even now, many years later, my friends notice that I often look back at engineering structures of this kind, be it antenna installations (often amateur radio installations on the roofs of houses), base stations of mobile operators, or television and radio transmitting towers (or , as they are called in Russia, RTPC).
While visiting the amateur radio club, the opportunity arose to acquire another computer in addition to the home PC available at that time. The appearance of this machine made it possible to study systems not from the Windows family on a grand scale. The first were Ubuntu and Debian. Next, Gentoo stood up for a year, which took almost two weeks to assemble. But by this time, a lack of time began to appear, which is why, after a year of staying on Gentoo, it was decided to abandon it - it took too much time to rebuild the “world.” I decided to switch to Debian, which to this day is my main Unix system, both as a user and as a worker..
In the early 2010s, when everything was running on Debian, but it was not clear where to utilize the resources, there was a desire to launch some kind of online service. Initially, these were ordinary games, for example, Minecraft, which was gaining popularity at that time, or good old CS 1.6.
By the way, R4SAS’s avatar still has the characteristic cube character from Minecraft.
After the games I was drawn to web technologies. An unremarkable domain was purchased, on which a website with a small forum was created for friends. Got my first experience working with websites.
Over time, the thought began to creep into my head about the security of all administered resources, stored data and transport protocols for communication. Thus, I began to study all the overlay networks that were known at that time. It was the end of 2014. Tor, despite statements from the developers and community about the security of communications using it, did not attract my attention.
Kirill was not interested in TOR because, first of all, this tool is used to bypass blocking. He did not have such a task. In addition, Thor's architecture is not completely decentralized, if you look closely. After the fall of the TOR network due to the failure of consensus (read, several servers in the hands of famous individuals) over the past three years, the desire to somehow monitor this network has completely disappeared. "Centralized decentralization of the network? Thank you, no need," explained R4SAS.
I was immediately fascinated by the crazy idea of I2P: unidirectional tunnels and the absence of any central nodes. I bet he had to do a fair amount of digging into the documentation to figure out how this could work!
That's when I met I2P. First in Java. 3 months of use have strongly tied me to the network. I didn’t write anything in the chat on IRC2P, but I actively read the documentation on the network, watched the progress of development and... cried from the gluttony of Java VM: 400 MB of RAM for a service that could barely push kilobytes of data through itself did not suit me at all . So I lost interest in the network... for about a year.
Returning to the network, I installed Java I2P again, but not for long, because... I soon learned about a new client in C++. During the year that I was away, orignal entered the development arena. By the time I appeared, the team of Moose (orignal [orignal] - “moose” in Canadian French, approx. acetone) had many interested people who in some way helped write code, documentation, catch bugs, or simply communicated on the channel # ru on IRC2P. The most memorable contributors of that time were hagen, xcps, psi (aka majestrate), mikalv, mlt, 0niichan and, of course, the villain aka lns aka villain.
At the stage of processing the raw text, I wanted to remove the listing of nicknames unknown to the reader, but still left them. I'm sure these people did a lot to inspire R4SAS to do what he does today in the project. Even if it was unconscious on their part, this is how a free community lives: new code is born on the basis of the ideas and enthusiasm of its predecessors.
At that time, i2pd was at version 2.5.0 [March 2016]. The packages were assembled during releases by Hagen. But he did not upload to the debian/changelog repository. When I was simply tired of waiting for Hagen to push the changelog and packages into release, I first started communicating with the development team. At that time, my work system on my home PC was Windows. The first thing I did in i2pd was to implement a normal assembly in the MSYS2 system without dependencies on Microsoft Visual Studio. My first commits to the project began to appear: documentation, configs, code style, work on the daemon for Windows.
By version 2.10.2 i2pd reaches a state of stability. This is where the nickname R4SAS appears. Accordingly, the first online resource in I2P, as is usually the case, becomes what? That's right, personal website: r4sas.i2p.
Later, other projects appeared around him that were interesting to me. For example, radio.r4sas.i2p, which was raised for fun and to test the functionality of i2pd in working with streams. This made it possible to catch some of the bugs that prevented the use of audio streaming inside I2P.
Just a year, and even more so two years ago, more or less stable sound transmission was a great achievement and partly a success in terms of the tunnels built. The other day I watched a series in an online cinema that does not open without workarounds. I was very surprised: i2pd on a smartphone allowed me to receive streaming video (480p) with minimal glitches (I used an output proxy to access the clearnet). Over the course of a couple of years, the active development of I2P is clearly visible - now success is measured by the ability to view video content.
With my participation, solely for humorous reasons, the resource wiki.ilita.i2p was created [to structure the history of the network, including local memes]. ILITA, as an IRC network, appeared at the end of 2016. It was created due to suspicions that the IRC2P administration had access to personal correspondence.
How many successful coincidences, and sometimes outright self-indulgence, ultimately form global infrastructures. Like an elite encyclopedia, the name ILITA IRC is ironic and humorous.
As for maintaining and paying for servers, sometimes there are difficulties. Not every hoster is happy that someone is constantly thrashing the processor (there are those where it is impossible to load the percentage above a certain percentage for a long time), there are situations when watermelons arrive (abuse) to services that still look at the clearnet (such was with OpenNIC). In terms of finances, I wouldn’t say it’s hard, but there have been cases when I needed to pay for a car, but I didn’t have enough donations. In such cases, there are sponsors (thanks to them!) who help in difficult times: you can turn to them, and they lend a helping hand. We can say that they help us as much as we help them by developing i2pd, which they use for some of their purposes.
Involvement in the network is the main driver: I can’t imagine I2P without the huge part of the resources that the enthusiasts maintain.
It is necessary to emphasize the atmosphere of the “terrible darknets” from the first mouth of a major administrator: in the I2P network - the second most popular anonymous network after TOR - the entire infrastructure lives and develops on pure enthusiasm, research interest and friendly relations within the community. By God, the most exciting online game with benefits for the intellect.
Community
For several years, as a hobby, I have been hosting public online services: DNS, anonymous proxy server and some others (priority in the I2P network). Thanks to this, I was lucky to meet the Community project. The Community collective calls itself a union of crypto-anarchists. Mostly known from public community projects git hosting. This is a very original project and I was curious to write to them as part of this material.
We, as anarchists, oppose the power of man over man and all forms of centralized control. Be it domestic violence from an alcoholic father, the dictatorship of the state apparatus or the totalitarianism of modern Internet corporations.
The prefix “crypto” in the word “crypto-anarchism” has many interpretations, including the most verified version on Wikipedia. In essence, we say that our team works in the field of information technology: secure communications, privacy and anonymity on the Internet. By analogy, there are eco-anarchists, anarcho-communists, anarcho-feminists, and so on. The root “anarcho” determines agreement with the basic values of anarchism - self-organization, the absence of a vertical power structure and the freedom of the individual as the highest value - and otherwise communities determine their type of interests independently, for clarity, denoting it in the name of their philosophy.
I am glad that there are curious, well-read and erudite people, enthusiasts. In our experience, most activists are not discerning about existing political, philosophical and economic models. It follows that the term “crypto-anarchism” even scares some people, despite the fact that the person himself is often very close to crypto-anarchism and anarchist positions in general.
The modern Internet is not the same network as it was 10-15 years ago. Now it is the center of world life: a source of connections, news and, unfortunately, but very naturally, repression. For those who understand this, it becomes clear that the Internet is also an important springboard for the fight for their freedoms and independence. Communication means primarily influence the ability to develop, generate new ideas and criticize. Is it worth explaining why there can be no freedom of thought and speech on corporate and state resources? I think no.
We started a couple of our projects with the clearnet, but completely curtailed them because we came to the conclusion that the anonymity that is needed for our struggle cannot be there. Even if the admin staff protects itself, an inexperienced user will step on a rake by simply requesting the address of our domain. If we are so critical of the issue of security in the clearnet as a whole, I won’t even answer the question about centralized platforms like telegram, this is profanity.
The rapid transformation of the darknet from a hobby into a tool for everyday guarantee of civil liberties seems a little utopian, since the average user has only recently become acquainted with a VPN and is inclined to consider it a panacea, but in general this line of thought is much more useful for people than the statements of official propaganda about hidden networks like about a hotbed of crime.
Parting words
Along with other questions, I tried to get advice or wishes from caring people who are interested in the topic of free Internet services, but do not know where to start taking action or simply have not formulated for themselves the boundaries of the concept of ethical online technologies. I have collected the advice and thoughts of all participants in the article together, without indicating the authorship of each thesis, in order to emphasize the general harmony of people from different free projects.
Free/open service administrator is not a job, it's a calling.
Do not forget to focus on data security: both yours and the users of the resource. Don't give users a reason to doubt the integrity of your project.
The administrator of a free resource, as the owner, must respect personal privacy and not try to dig out customer information. Hypocrisy will kill the admin’s own interest, and at the same time his spiritual ideals and, as a result, all the work done.
Revolutions don't work if you look at history. The Theory of Small Things works. Just do what you know in the right direction in your opinion. Join movements and projects, enrich them with your ideas, and your mind with the ideas of others.
Make your project not like a revolution or guerrilla warfare (although your actions will often have a similar effect), but rather like a game. The Man Playing will push the Consumer to the margins of history.
You can start your journey with anything. You can simply create a resource that you think will be interesting to users. You can initially study the market for the necessary services and start a project that is obviously in demand. Much depends on the skills you have and your persistence in acquiring them. The main thing is the desire to be a member of an equal community.
You will know Zen when you understand that the price of the convenience of the infrastructure of Apple, Google, Yandex and other corporations is measured not in money, but in your freedom.
Conclusion
The culture of free services fits poorly into the capitalist system: no one makes money from users secretly, and no one demands money directly. Free projects are born and live through the efforts of the most ordinary people, who do not always have a specialized education or money in their pockets behind them. Unlike flashy commercial projects, independent small-scale ventures have a soul - the motives and care of administrators poring over their brainchild on a weekend evening. As can be seen from the stories of the heroes of this article, sometimes hobby projects grow into an entire infrastructure that thousands of people rely on every day.
It is likely that these parties lack at least the greenest marketer who will package the idea of an independent Internet in beautiful pictures and slogans. Personally, I like the idea of being involved in a small project that serves my email, rather than buying another imposed paid subscription. Autonomous projects give me hope that self-organization of people is possible and the impending dependence on a handful of masters is not a death sentence, but a call to fight. In the end, human self-respect is not just another slogan of the military registration and enlistment office, but a source of energy for emancipation. If, of course, there is still a spark of freedom and individuality on the other side of the screen.
For personal acquaintance with free services, I recommend list Riseup, server list Fediverse as well Co-op cloud. These are good starting points for diving into the world of ethical online services..
