---------------------------------------- Hello World June 2nd, 2022 ---------------------------------------- Hello World! Happy to be here at last - better late than never, right? ;-) I guess that, being a newcomer in the Gopherspace, I should at least provide a brief introdution of myself: one of my nicknames is +mala (but you can also call me by my given name, as it is easy to find!) and I do ML at the tweet factory, with the aim of using it to serve the public conversation. In the past I have written/translated a few computer books, I have been an academic lecturer and researcher, I have helped bootstrap a few successful startups, and --more importantly-- I created 3564020356.org and kept it alive for about 20 years now. 356*, as I often call it, is one of the first “hacking challenge” websites, born at the beginning of this millennium. Quoting my PhD thesis (see http://davide.eynard.it/phd/thesis_20090223.pdf): "it has 28 levels, each one with a riddle and a forum, and more than 20000 users. It has no advertisement and no spam, and most of its contents are not indexed by any search engine, as to enter it you still have to solve that first riddle. Nevertheless, the website still has around 2000 visits per month, even if it was officially frozen in 2005. As one of the main rules of the game was “solve the riddles, no matter how you do it”, during its life the website has been attacked many times by its own players: every time a security hole was exploited, players used to send a brief explaination of how they cracked it so that the problem could be fixed and everyone else could learn something new out of it. In August, 2008, after years without new riddles, some users tried to exploit a bug in the website to gain full access on the server and... publish new riddles. Now, nothing can stop them from playing and learning. 356, as I like to call it, still means very much to me. It has always been there, looking at the world while it was changing. It survived the dot-com bubble, actually being a dot-nothing at that time. It changed place many times, starting with old tower PCs, moving to racks and finally retiring in a virtual machine. It saw generations of searchers and reverse engineers playing with it, actually the most fair community I have ever seen. It was pure fun, participation, collaboration and self-moderation. And I still haven’t understood why it worked so damn well." So, why am I writing here? For a few months now I have grown more and more intolerant of basically all mainstream social networks, which might sound crazy given my job, but I think you'll find quite reasonable given how all of them are evolving now... I was happy to join Twitter, as to me it still looked like a relatively small company driven by good intentions and way more open than other social networks. I was (and still am) happy to work on systems whose aim is to help reduce platform abuse, but when the news of a multibillionaire willing to buy us came out, I strongly questioned myself and whether my work could still be used for a good purpose, rather than to promote one's political agenda. As sometimes happens when I feel down, I reconnected to 356* after a long while, to see how things were going there... And well, in those deserted forums I heard some voices echoing, as they would do in the emptiness of the abandoned mines of Moria. One user had just completed all of the riddles, more than 20 years after they were made public! And few other users were cheering him, complimenting him for making it almost alone, while he was replying that past wisdom preserved in the forums was essential for him to go through some of the hardest challenges. Once more, I was blown away by my own creation. How could it still be working so well, with basically no intervention on my side except the bare minimum technical efforts required to keep it alive? When doing meditation, a lot is said about mindfulness and intention. I think it is not too stretched to say that one of the main things that characterize 356*, and make it so different from many social networks, is intention. That is what makes its users a community of practice, instead of a generic network. And that is what makes its contents so meaningful to its users, especially in contrast to much of the content you can find elsewhere. I think Gopherspace is not so different from this. The reason why I started to appreciate it, way before I had to address my personal "elONphant in the room", was that I was already feeling way more connected to those people participating in it than to most of my contacts, followees, or "friends" elsewhere. And this is the reason why I am here now: I want to find intention, learn new things, and put them into practice to create something new.