The Mandelbear's Musings

How does working offline, and moving data to the edge, apply to the idea of an "online community"?

What if the idea of membership was not defined by whether a server somewhere has your email address and password on it, but by whether the other members of the group know to pull from you, using a distributed revision control system?

To join a group, you would get the URL for someone else's repository, clone it, edit, add a user page that contains a URL for your own repository, and ask someone to pull. Groups that wanted to automate joining could run "pull bots", and groups that didn't could require out-of-group introductions, or require one user to "sponsor" another by linking to the new user's repository URL from his or her user page.

Then, to participate in conversations, first pull from the other members of the group and merge. At the simplest, use Ikiwiki to build an RSS view of the latest messages. Or use software that gives you a newsreader-like interface. Write your own messages, commit, and push where you're allowed to or wait for others to pull. Repository URLs could be stored inside the community archives, as sponsorship links or bot-maintained pages. Some could be .onion URLs to let users participate pesudonymously and free them from having to get conventional hosting.