As written on my introduction to my home page, I spend my life in several areas interlaced, nature, computers, martial arts culture, and fantasy and imaginary through books and roleplaying games that eventually brought me to mythology and spirituality. Other fields of interests that interlace and have bonds with all that, are editing, publishing and networking. In all the senses these words can hvae.

I always needed a commitment to power my desire for action. The theme for that action has been changing (and circling) through time, but I’ve always needed special interest or commitment on something special to feed my motivation.

Among my motivations are a desire to explore and learn, and a willing to seek for the source, the origin of things. That’s how I feel to have strong foundations.

In the field of computers, that led me to seek the understanding of low level and high level in technical practices, and also to collect memories and gather history of a culture I saw growing and I grew up with, the era of BBSes (see the BBS documentary) and the shaping of the Internet, particularly for the interconnections they bring, and the retrocomputing enthusiasm that makes older stuff attractive, as well as practices that made that time, like the demoscene.

It’s not that today’s tool don’t have anything attractive, it’s that the spirit of sharing and creating has shifted to merchandizing, first in the big capital venture platforms where the content and all our interactions are merchandized, then because the audience get polarized into professional commercial creators and (rather) passive consumers. These platforms and tools shape the interactions and our behaviors in that direction, too. Let me state this, it’s not wrong to be an activately participating spectator, many creative content creator and online actors built enthusiast communities. What I address here, is that the tools shape it that way, putting forward a model where some most famous person have "reach" to so called "followers", and that all our behaviors are monitored and merchandized, every like or comment enters a mad money machine having an incidence on our psyche, and pushing forward an endless consumption of ressources that has real impact on the Earth and the life it sustains.

Being happy to see creators having success in creating fruitful content, I can’t thus trash the whole thing. However, it is good to be aware of the processes they bring us into, and that other ways of creating and publishing are possible. The act of creating and sharing was built in since the beginning in the networking adventure (its name actually suggests it, bringing interconnection), and it is still there. Maybe a bit as a subculture, although it is getting more and more visible today. But subcultures have always been too. I want to put these a bit more in the lights.

Of course, all what I am writing today, I can only do it, because many people created marvelous things, and many others wrote about it. I am summarizing what I have learned through time and it is thanks to all those who already talked about these things throughout the years. So, it’s a bit like taking a particular pair of binoculars, and see through my lenses what I feel important in that computer culture.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is the first thing I want to explore. It was made to create content and to have links between the content each of us can publish, at our own numerical places. It was built upon the idea of linking and sharing. The building up of the Internet was like an ecosystem consisting of technicians, academics and enterprises building it, people and academic sharing through it, and commercial services.

Graduately, some businesses became giant corporations (that we’ll call BigTech), that pushed evolutions forwards (not necessarily the only ones, nor for the better), had wide visibility because of their prominence, brought convenience, interactions and communities gathering, among those, what we know today as "social media". They provided free of money, a space to be online and to connect others as long as you followed some rules, notably "staying inside". But this was not without costs.

Everything has a cost of course. But here, this cost is losing what made the principles of the open online communities that built up the Internet from its grounds. While the web was open, and communities had their place in autonomy or semi-autonomy, now communities are scattered through huge closed places they depend on to varying degrees, and are bound to terms involving their data and privacy. This is all well summarized and illustrated in this comic by The Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people2021

Well, many communities, not all of them, resistance and creativity is still there, on a quest for a relative autonomy (relying upon the inter-dependances principles, with chosen tiers). And we can make it grow. This website is one step through that direction. With the help of many fellows, past and future. Bringing back together, rehabilit, an Internet web made of links and sharing, that does not track each online action undertaken.

Additionally, while focusing on building spaces designed for humans, we also need to care for the ressources we use, and to focus on being gentler with the Earth. This leads us to aim at shifting technologies towards small technology and small web, because Small is beautiful (bringing economy where people matter) as fellow tech & human enthousiasts are building and clearing the path with love <3

In this sense, my home page is a statement for my online presence.

Of course, not everybody has the skills, nor the desire to handcraft everything, because they prefer to spend time on what they care and like to craft themselves. But we can create a common good, that is, you can join spaces that people take care collectively for others, it can be a commercial too, but we’ll try to look for places that want to stay at human size. In the social media, having interactions between multiple places is possible thanks to the magic of the Fediverse. Other softwares are available too, a good entry point is Framasoft, it is welcoming and easy to get in. There are many more of course, however you need to start somewhere.