My first mud experience was TFE back in the 90s at uni and I tanked psychology because of it. I decided to learn how to make my own (incidentally how I ended up in software engineering!) which never had a single player but 30~ developers for a period of 2-3 years hacking away on areas.. MUDs were the original community-coded-projects!
I have OFTEN considered the idea of writing a new MUD with the intention of bringing in a whole new realm of users to the genre but have never really worked out how to make it viable (I cannot see anyone funding a team to build a MUD startup)
I have some ideas though.. I think telnet is too intimidating for new players. The barrier to entry is too high. They need to work on mobile, they need to probably be some kind of browser-based experience with font styling and the lightest touch UI beyond the old '>' prompt.
If anyone's keen on dropping some coin I have 30 years of thinking on the subject and would happily leave my day job ;)
I did work experience when I was in highschool at an old-school printing press with 100yo german made printing machines and I got the opportunity to play with typesetting using real brass. It was pretty cool and massively time-consuming, I love the DIY nature of this I think it would be great for teaching school kids about traditional printing.
This is not the first time, see the Flagellum Motor (which is far more complex) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum
(often used in ontological arguments)
The notion that a platform is responsible for what I say on it is still a problem for decentralized 'instance' based networks like mastadon, the burden of removing content the culture of the day finds offensive moves to the local hacker who decided to setup an instance and host their friends.
I want to be fully responsible for what I decide to say, if I break the law, that should be entirely on me.
I want a protocol that allows me to host my own content on my website and let other people in the fediverse 'like', 'comment' and 'share' it.. So 'social media' becomes less about a service that does hosting and more about a client that does the aggregation and interacts with others I'm following
Goal met in 10 minutes by turning it into a language war! I wonder if there's something in that, a service for charity fundraising that lets people donate to vote on their favorite X?.
Kinda shameful to boast about a project designed to make it easier for 'authorities' to displace people who are just trying to 'live' some kind of existence.
Please don't justify it with weird edge-cases like 'oh but we can detect drug cartels' or some BS.. This is about forcing people to conform to a designed western capitalist modality that expects humans to be happy living as battery-farmed chickens..
* get an education so you start out life with an 80k debt so you:
* get a high tax paying job so you can aspire to:
* get a home mortgage for the next 45 years with a bank so you:
* support the system that funnels money and power to the few at the top.
This project is just another small rivet in the armor of that system which you should be fighting to de-construct not re-enforce.. wake up and realise you're building your own cage.
If I buy land to start a community on it of like-minded people who don't feel comfortable supporting an oppressive system that creates injustice then that's my business, when are software engineers going to realise we have an OBLIGATION to HUMANITY to refuse to create the chains that bind us to the wheel of oppression?? JUST REFUSE, it's OK! you can get a job elsewhere! You don't NEED to build another system for a company who makes money supplying the technology that governments use to keep their population compliant to the machine.