Independent Online Services: The Philosophy of the Free Internet and the Stories of Its Administrators

Hornbeam

40 min

The Internet in the perception of a modern person is a set of well-known sites: several social networks, three or four instant messengers, public services and Avito. Before the exodus to social media (2008-2012 AD), offline blogs were ubiquitous—independent corners of the web where people read each other’s motley sites and constantly surfed through links in search of new internet neighbors. Now this phenomenon has evolved into publics and channels: blogs and bloggers have become concepts from the plane of the same pair of instant messengers and centralized social networks, where in fact there is no separate life. The global network was centralized in the hands of the owners of large sites.

For everyday leisure like cats and car reviews, this model is quite good: it is easy to post, find and like it on a centralized resource, and moderators will filter out all the "prohibition". But how does a giant centralized platform pay for the service being free? Any online resource is not good magic, but someone else's computer on the Internet, backed by administrators and software developers. At whose expense do we feast, and what is the price? As you know: who pays - he orders the song. If users do not pay, what kind of music is played in the offices of Google, Vk, Telegram and others, who benefits from hundreds of developers with immodest salaries in a free service?

Nothing personal, it's business

Each organization has its own rules of ethics, taboo topics, as well as the ability to block any information. Discussions are allowed only within predetermined limits: users are forced to follow rules that may contradict their inner moods. As a result, it is necessary to filter speech for "eloquence", to show feelings that are not there, or to hide negativity in someone's address (although there is no desire to seem like a gentleman inside), and also to comply with copyright and license agreements (while being a pirate at heart) . "At least someone will educate you!" - the conditional reader of advanced years will object. Education? .. Rather, training. Corporate restrictions are based on extreme populism, not 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 many people work in them and financial activity is in full swing. The problem is that this turns a commercial structure into a potential tool of totalitarian control already on the part of the state, which is fraught for those who spoke inaccurately not with profile blocking, but with a criminal case. From here, politics is added to the self-censorship from the previous point, which is why even cat posting is safe only as long as it does not diverge from the party line.

The goal of popular social networks is to make money on people, not people as such. All sensitive information, with rare exceptions, will be transferred to third parties in uniform, whose jurisdiction allows you to annoy the provider company in case of refusal. In terms of Russian realities, it is appropriate to mention SORM , which monitors communication networks not only from the outside, but in some cases penetrates into data centers at the organizations’ own expense, as a result of which the security forces do not even need an official appeal to the company’s office or court to obtain information - tintakli collect possible compromising information automatically and start cases in semi-automatic modes. According to publicly available data, such habits are not alien to foreign guardians of thoughts, for example, the union of five / nine / fourteen eyes (EN).

The picture is very frightening, almost fatalistic. Unfortunately, awareness of the issue of free communications is limping due to the information vacuum of any alternative solution due to the "no funding - no advertising - no publicity" phenomenon, so projects that are ethical from the point of view of civil liberties remain unknown to the target audience. Despite this, free resources remained on the Internet - and moreover, they are developing. Many of them fall into the category of messengers and social networks, as well as email providers, VPNs and file hosting, and everything else that comes to mind.

I propose to briefly get acquainted with a few enthusiasts on whose shoulders lies the initiative and life support of the Internet without corporations, registration by phone number, draining our personal data and other things that we hate, but are used to. What better way to see the lifeblood of the independent internet than the personal beliefs and stories of the administrators of the free internet?

404.city

A free messenger that meets modern user requirements is a very difficult task. For more than a decade, XMPP/Jabber has been in great demand as a replacement for non-free messengers , 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, which means that it requires servers that will register users, store chat history, and generally communicate with other users and servers.

One of the largest modern XMPP servers is 404.city . It has a constant online presence of several thousand users and a long history, and, 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 just private communication, not infected with spy trackers and algorithms that manipulate public consciousness. The idea was to create a virtual city where all users would feel like full members of the infrastructure.

From here, the idea of the 404.city domain, which suggests an unknown city, becomes clear. 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 rests on the financial issue.
Our resource has a large user base, thanks to word of mouth and a long lifetime. Several ambitious XMPP projects have come and gone in recent years, and stability is important for users - confidence in tomorrow's uptime. The service has many users from all over the world, and is even partly used by several technical schools for internal communication.
Administering 404.city is comparable to managing a site or a forum with a large number of people: a constant stream of messages to the support service, technical control of software health, protection against spam attacks. If errors occur after updating Ejabberd [server software], the 404.city team will fix them.
There are dreams to introduce new projects into the infrastructure, but there are not enough resources for this now. Administrators put everything they can into the XMPP server so 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 take on an unbearable burden on a hot head. This will only bring frustration to us and our users.
The main difficulty is the lack of funds and investors for the development of the project. Community donations are barely enough to pay for hosting. The creators of the project are mostly people who are fond of software and information technology, but we provide support on pure enthusiasm and only in our free time. The ambitions of a virtual city of dreams, unfortunately, must reckon with the harsh reality and the need to feed yourself and your family.

Despite the difficulties, the guys from 404.city are categorically not considering shutting down the service, as it would not only be their personal surrender, 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 a news feed, photos and memes, but this is not so. Social networks with funny pictures have every right to life, like the rest of people's Internet habits. 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." With these words, a large podcast about the decentralized social network Fediverse begins . It is Fediverse that today is a promising alternative to the usual Twitter, Vkontakte and the like: hundreds and thousands of independent servers are combined into one network thanks to a common protocol, giving users the choice of an administrator they trust, or the ability to raise their own server if they wish. And all this while maintaining the usual subscriptions and contacts. I highly recommend you check 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 next two heroes realized this dream.

Dr.Quadragon

So, I have 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. 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 distributions. By the age of 16 or 17, I removed Windows from all the machines in the house, simply because Linux simply worked better.
Online since 2001. Before that, a little Fido . If a computer can do EVERYTHING, then the Internet, being the sum of all computers, can do EVERYTHING - simply because computers can be connected, and this is potentially the most powerful democratizing force. EVERYONE should have such a thing, and EVERYONE should have the right to participate in it. For me, by 2004, it was already absolutely clear, and was not discussed.
The first experience of blogging is LJ, but something didn’t go very well there. The liveinternet.ru platform became my home in 2007. More communities to follow. Antifa, anarchist chat, imageboards, gathering people to organize online raids. Some were ashamed, but I was not in a very good mental state then. Anonymous, the Chanologiya project, other initiatives of Anons - this is never a shame for this. It was cool. The Internet showed its teeth to a very dangerous adversary, 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 the Internet culture and the various manifestations of the struggle that are used in it. By the word "anons" Doc (a shortened form of the nickname Dr. Quadragon) means Anonymous - an essentially uncontrolled online community that was especially well-known in the second half of the 2000s thanks to protests against totalitarian state and religious organizations, imposing censorship and control. These were spam, DDoS and other types of attacks aimed at disorganizing the operation of sites and other network infrastructure. The most recognizable symbol of Anonymous is the Guy Fawkes mask.

A man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask in one of the videos posted by Anonymous

Around 2008, I got to my Wordpress blog. However, all the time I had the feeling that I was alone in my blog. On liveinternet.ru I had an audience, there were people who subscribed to me. To whom I can and want to tell something. On my single blog, I actually wrote to nowhere. And it seemed to me absolutely unfair thing. It turned out that you are either on some platform where everyone is sitting, and you have a reason to write, or you are on your site, which you erected with your own hands, and where you diligently do everything yourself, but there is exactly zero point in writing there. This goes against the democratizing function of the Internet, and instead of giving power to everyone, it turns out that power is concentrated in the hands of platform owners. I do not like it this way. I want to be able to control my digital life.
But what if WordPress could communicate with the same servers as email and XMPP do? Then there would be no need for centralized platforms at all. 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 - exactly what I was looking for. There were attempts to host the Diaspora, but it did not work, everything broke down. The idea had to be abandoned. I registered on one of the instances, but then it was not interesting for me to live on someone else's server.
I didn't know anything about Fediverse. I had to give up the search, but I never forgot the idea, it sunk into my subcortex. I remembered about it only in the year around 2016, when I graduated from the institute. I began to search. Frendika... Somehow cumbersome. GNU Social is kind of old... There were a number of projects that I had never heard of. I found it odd that the ActivityPub federation protocol that Fediverse is built on is based on HTTP. Compared to XMPP, this seemed unreasonably cumbersome. And then I came across some Mastodon. Ruby... It's cumbersome, I guess. But it seems to be nothing, like the people who sit there praise. Microblogging, a new genre for me... Do I want to get involved in this? Well, what the hell is not joking! In April 2017, I register mastodonsocial.ru and host my Mastodon node on some semi-free, dead VPS. Which, Of course, it goes down the drain in a couple of months. BUT! In this couple of months, I have accumulated a couple of dozen subscribers, and took a few people on board! Some I already knew more or less. But everything broke down and was forgotten at work.

I often hear complaints from people who cannot complete their ideas and projects. As history shows, this is an absolutely normal course of development. Some of the plans will surely sink into oblivion, as untenable, but even they provide invaluable experience. The other part of the projects will certainly be resurrected when the work on the mistakes and, possibly, rethinking is done. If Doc's story ended here, she wouldn't be here!

I restarted the project after two to three months on the same domain. I thought one evening: "Hey! This... worked! Man, this is what you were looking for! that's possible too!"
Which is what I did. I created a separate virtual machine on my German server, put Mastodon there, and decided - go ahead, let's see how much I have enough and how devoted I am to my ideas.
And then, all of a sudden, someone writes to my instance. But not from Matododont, but from some other engine. And... I just fall out. It blew my mind. It turns out - it turns out!!! - Other servers may be compatible with Mastodon. It's not about communication between Mastodon servers, but about communication between my Mastodon and projects on other engines. EEE WHAT'S HAPPENING, HOW DID IT PASS BY ME? I went to dig. And I learned so many amazing things that I decided to make a small historical podcast about it [the same one that was mentioned just above].
About two years later, I find out that domains .rucan now be selected out of court, and I arrange a vote for a new domain name. mastodon.ml wins . Soon I'm launching a new instance, giving people a link, and freezing the old one. Well, the rest is history...

Global feed mastodon.ml. The screenshot shows a post with a cat published on another server.

Like everyone else, in my projects and ideas I sometimes get into a stupor - stagnation and depression sets in. Perhaps the source of inspiration is one of the key goals of this article. Doc's penetrating enthusiasm is worthy of respect, such stories are the best impetus for action.

I am driven by anarchism. I love watching someone very big and powerful suddenly find themselves naked and defenseless in front of millions of people. How vertical structures of power are collapsing. I'm a very techno-optimistic dude and I believe that even though technology by itself doesn't always solve social problems, it helps a hell of a lot. The printing press broke the churchmen's monopoly on knowledge. The computer has destroyed the monopoly in the media: now everyone can make their own publication, their own radio station and even television if they wish. The social media monopoly must also be destroyed by all means, and their owners must be shown as the "naked kings" that they are. And there is only one way to do this - by logically ending the Internet and showing what anyone can do 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 understandWE DONT NEED THEM, THEY NEED WE. There is a key phrase in my Fediverse Story - "it turns out you can."
For now, this is a hobbyist thing, 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 access to something similar, I would like to discuss it. Independent sites are absolutely necessary, because "dependent" sites have shown their inconsistency, and the longer it goes on, the worse it will be. And the worse for them, the better for us. Fuck them all, Abdullah, set them on fire.

After February 2022, Doc, as a citizen of the Russian Federation, had natural difficulties with paying for foreign hosting. At first, he switched to paying with the funds of foreign donors, but then a hosting provider (also foreign) was found, which donated its capacities in the name of the life of a large node of a decentralized social network, which indirectly fell into the sanction batch. Free decentralized projects are not self-isolation in small communities. This is about true union.

A public server is not only maintenance tasks, but also administrative issues so that the server does not turn into a hangout for trolls and unethical pornography lovers. In this, according to Doc, several people help him on a completely voluntary basis, removing most of the burden from him. If you are not a sysadmin by vocation, think 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 case of unreasonable repression.

Tolstoevsky

I was born in the family of an engineer and a doctor, and my father, a radio schizik engineer, assembled conscientious Spectrum clones using dendrofecal engineering. Not that for sale - Just for fun, as they say.
Around the age of 6 I was admitted to the games, and around 9-10 I was admitted to the BASIC book. As a result of this devastating effect on the child's psyche, the shiza was formed in an engineering way, albeit 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 CPU was cooled simply by a glass of water installed directly on the "pebble") - Win95 occupied almost half of the space allotted to it by the manufacturer and did the same in benchmarks, but the virgin one, installed by my friend (the owner of rich parents and the latest Pentium at that time with a 100MHz processor). Fuck knows why, but at that moment I managed not to realize that this is, in fact, a ready-made profession of a system administrator, and for some reason I was sure that I would become a programmer ...

Personally, he is known to me as the administrator of the Fediverse site that I use, and an avid small web fan who loves text sheets more than pretty pictures . His history (and even in his manner!) is a lamp and living monument of the free Runet.

Having exhausted what I was supposed to do at school, I rushed to the local university for the specialty "Applied Mathematics and Informatics", from where I flew straight into the army two years later, because I realized that programming, and even more so mathematics, is not mine at all.
Since in parallel with the simulation of training, I simulated the work of a laboratory assistant at a local research institute. After the army, using old connections, I decided to restore my brains, working at the Polytechnic University as a "technician" (read - enikey and fitter), at the same time studying as a PR specialist (sic!). Learned this time. By the time I received my diploma in PR, I was already a system administrator in a bank, and then everything began to spin ...
I'm lying. Everything began to spin precisely in the process of working at the Polytechnic University. Once I got tired of me, being so smart, modest and handsome, pulling wires, and showing enikey in Windows to accountants, and in interesting places like the server room, something incomprehensible and mysterious is spinning. And I got to the bottom of the boss: "Scrubber, give a friend a system to touch! I'm disgusted with Windows, I won't save it, I even get drunk not out of natural inclination, but from inescapable grief!". The boss was given a FreeBSD disk, and my stepfather (dad had been replaced by that time a long time ago) found a book on this system. And this is where it really kicked in! After a week or two of stormy techno-porno, red eyes and pulling out hair in unexpected places, the realization of three simple truths came:
1. This shit works;
2. This bullshit works FAST;
3. This garbage does what I need!
Do I need to say that I have not returned to Windows since then? ..

I apologize if artistic distortions of grammar seem inappropriate to you, but I didn’t raise my hand to edit Tolstoevsky’s original texts: acquaintance with FreeBSD is described so vividly that I want to log in as root from a vintage keyboard.

Having mastered the fryakha [popular name FreeBSD], I took up what was spinning on the Polytech 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, it was not difficult to master it. Having gained experience and restored the functioning of the interaural nerve node after the army (a little less than two years), he went to work in a bank, which I already mentioned above, where they still paid some money, which made it possible not only to thump, 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 corporatist. Cheap VPS-ki became available to me and turned into a field of experiments - fortunately, there was some experience for deploying services "for my uncle". Own mail, blog (at first on WordPress) and even (after a while) OwnCloud found their first incarnation.
Further search 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 left as a cuckoo and went to Thailand, I rushed to the clones created by the former inhabitants of the bug - 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] at that time was already hopelessly dead, but the project was still alive and developing. And he completely fascinated me - and, first of all, not with the chic idea "let's let the social network work federated like e-mail", but with the inhabitants - the percentage of people who were completely interesting to the whole head just went off scale compared to any centralized products. I was overwhelmed. And then I finally decided to start my own server - this is 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 was thinning and rotten ...
And then Evgen came with his Mastodon. Everything about Mastodon fascinated me - speed, design, and, of course, the community. Yes, again, people first. In the Diaspora, these were personalities like Rami Rosenfeld, but here I came across Doc - his enthusiasm was so contagious that after chatting on his server (and in the process realizing that this is not just a distributed network, but a network of distributed - DIFFERENT - social networks, which just broke my brain with orgasmic ecstasy) after a while, I raised my node and, inspired by the site switching.social , filed what you can now see on fedi.life .
Initially, I thought on fedi.life just to translate the original, but the idea changed on the go. Moreover, this was originally the fruit of collective work - a large number of people took part, I mainly translated and wrote texts, the rest diligently directed, reworked and corrected, gave an abyss of ideas for design and structure. The original text was mercilessly shredded and shortened so that the brain raped by Twitter was able to perceive what we were trying to convey. It seems to me that it turned out well.
Mastodon, according to the apt expression of the same Doc, turned out to be an excellent product (due to which it gained popularity), but it is a rather lousy program. I, who by that time had seriously plunged into the topic of minimalism, began to search again. The mastodon strongly ate the resources of virtual machines and S3 storage that were expensive for me at that time, and the interface was too heavy, so the choice fell on Pleroma. At the same time, I decided to promote simple and lightweight services. Thus, phreedom.club was born .
Everything was going great - additional services were being deployed, more and more lightweight frontends. Along the way, I discovered Gemini for myself and it became another love - easy in terms of resources and development, by definition a niche and uninteresting tool for corporations, the tool could not fail to attract interesting people (and people are the essence of any community for me, as I think you guessed it) ). A significant part of my infusion into SmolNet (the minimalism movement of which Gemini is a part) was rawtext.club from the supporters of Smolnet and Slow Movement, done very well and elegantly. I got a lot 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 (after living 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 inability to restore the database (because the only backup turned out to be unsuitable for recovery). Instead, deployed Misskey ( mk.phreedom.club), which, from the user’s point of view, goes against the ideology of minimalism - the interface is very heavy and frankly overloaded in places (from the point of view of the admin, by the way, on the contrary, it is an extremely simple and non-gluttonous tool), which somewhat violated my principles. But what we have, we have. Evolution-s. Maybe Misskey will get a lightweight interface soon.

I would like to note the presence of not only naked enthusiasm, but also life-affirming convictions: love and respect for people, freedom of thought and speech. Could Tolstoevsky develop his projects for years if he was only interested in technology, excluding from the context the people for whom they are created? I guess not. Altruism is a characteristic of many people in the free tech environment. This is the spirit of humanity I mean when I say that what I see in free tech is not a bunch of freaks, but the sweetest community of real people. Yes, there are toxic characters, but I'm sure they have something more than just a desire to assert themselves by participating in a socially significant project.

As I’ve said many times before, people are the foundation. Community means interaction. I, being a pronounced introvert, strive to do a lot on my own, but, not being a sociophobe, I do it not only for myself - the usefulness of a person’s actions for others is, perhaps, the key point. It's not about trying to "satisfy the consumer", of course. To bend one's own line is important, this is what determines development. But to pupate in your own little world, turning into a littka like the developers of the Diaspora, is not worth it.
Ideology, beliefs, political and sexual orientation are tinsel. Ideology is important, not ideology. The idea that drives my actions is extremely simple - people should decide, and people should decide for themselves. To support those who can’t cope, can’t, are too stupid or lazy - NECESSARY. But only in the "give a fishing rod and instructions for it, well, fish for the first time" mode. So where do you write me down - in libertarians, socialists, al communists - it's up to you. I don't have any "firm convictions". I can only say with conviction that the system is now, in all areas without exception, imprisoned for the transformation of a person into an amoeba - a consumer incapable of making truly independent decisions and manifesting individuality (the natural desire of an individual to be a personality has long and firmly been saddled by the industry of standard goods for not-such Everybody).
Postscript I wish every reader to get acquainted with the projects SmolNet, Small Web, Trivial Technologies and Slow Motion.

Darknet

Overlay networks aimed at user anonymity are called hidden networks. Most often, for the general designation of such technologies, the term darknet is used, with which I do not quite agree, which I already wrote about , since the image of a mysterious crime is not exactly what you will find in hidden networks. However, the word has already taken root and it is pointless to argue with this.

Several intranet I2P administrators have agreed to contribute to this article. Without them, the material on the spirit of free communication would be by no means complete. Even if you have never used I2P and don't intend to in the future, their stories will be useful for general knowledge.

Postman

Postman, in Russian - Postman, without exaggeration, one of the oldest active members of the I2P community. Two popular services are based on his care.

The first is mail.i2p email with the ability to send emails from the hidden network to the clearnet (i.e., the regular Internet) and also receive emails from both other users of the hidden service and from subscribers from the clearnet. In particular, I use this service in my journalistic and near-journalistic activities. There is a separate note about mail.i2p .

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 date, where new distributions appear daily.

The critical infrastructure of the TOR network, which is highly centralized in its architecture, is maintained by officials like research institutes in the US and Europe. When I first learned about the mail service in I2P, I thought that this was also something official and might even exist at the expense of 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 far from what it is today. I was interested in the potential of the project, but I was not a programmer, let alone a sufficient level of knowledge of the Java language to join the development. I had some programming experience as I was an avid computer nerd at the time, but administration became my calling.
Then the network did not offer any real infrastructure services, and I realized that there is where to roam. In 2003 (really that was so long ago!) I contacted the main developer (jrandom at that time) and proposed a mail service to the community, which was subsequently warmly received. The result was the first version of i2pmail. Gateways to the outside world were later added, the service became semi-official, and provided a stable bridge between clearnet and I2P in terms of mail. I then created an IRC server that eventually became known as IRC2P, where development discussions and open-ended conversations take place.
The torrent tracker started its work based on the fixed bytemonsoon, which is able to work with I2P addresses instead of real IPs. It soon 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 . Still, I am a programmer, when circumstances force me to do so.

There is an archive of my articles and videos on tracker2.postman.i2p

My philosophy has always been this: everyone can contribute to the development of the network. Anyone with a few dollars on hand and an idea in their head can offer a service that will be used. I2P is not interesting for commercial companies, here everything 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 and surprising place.

Despite the fact that no one is seriously trying to compete with Postman's services, negative arguments periodically surface on the network that this anonymous person maliciously monopolized communications in the hidden network.

Monopoly was never the goal, and I myself was surprised at how successful the services turned out to be. Most novice admins are faced with the fact that starting a business is relatively easy, but keeping it afloat is a completely different and very difficult thing! Over the years I have 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 all this is part of a special I2P ecosystem. But I'm still here. This is my ongoing contribution to the development of the community. What makes me keep 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 cost of the data center, I just have to keep going. This is part of my life.

To my question about attitudes towards prejudices about the dark web, 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 mind is equated with crime, and it is unlikely that we will be able to do something about it. But crime and anonymity are unrelated planes, if you look seriously. The government doesn't really need glasnost, but I2P and similar technologies are not outlawed [in the US] in order to save the face of democracy and freedom. In fact, crime exists separately and is always revealed in the same way: money transfers, delivery of physical things, and so on. 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.

Text from English-speaking people, unfortunately, is much less. This is due to my poor ability to communicate in non-Russian. But the topic of I2P will not be left out thanks to the next person.

R4SAS

Our films about hackers are mostly foreign, so the image of a person rummaging through technologies also fits mainly with an overseas brother. For reference: the word "hacker" is not about "break", but about "hack" or "fumble" 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, therefore there are many real hackers among the Russian-speaking population of the planet. I contacted one of these in the framework of this material.

R4SAS [er four es hey es] (if desired, the four can be read in English) is the legendary personality of I2P, the 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 exactly executed using i2pd.

Kirill (R4SAS name, possibly not real, which he does not hide) maintains the Purple I2P community repositories (the name of the i2pd team) 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, from PrivateBin and DNS to reg.i2p, a large on-net registrar of short domain names in the zone .i2punder the auspices of Purple I2P.

The page for registering a short domain in the i2p zone

Virtually, I have known Kirill for about two years now. It is not customary to ask about personal things in anonymous chats, but for this article R4SAS agreed to tell about himself in great detail (as far as possible in his status).

It all started with an interest in computers in my school years. The first was a computer at the parents at work, which was spinning on Win98. Over the years, interest intensified, and when the ceiling of driving skills with a mouse and setting a user password was reached, interest in engineering sciences, especially radio engineering, appeared. I started learning how to work with a soldering iron, try to build circuits or even fix some simple (sometimes not quite) things. Thus, I gained experience working with PC hardware - I learned how to basicly maintain computers (cleaning, repairing power supplies and motherboards at the level of replacing elements such as capacitors).
In some year, it came to the interest to study "Amateur Radio". There were several amateur radio circles in my city, one of which I began to attend as I wished. 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, whether they are antenna installations (often amateur radio, on the roofs of houses), base stations of mobile operators, or television and radio transmitting towers (or , as they are called in Russia, RTPC).
During the visit to the circle of radio amateurs, it became possible 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 got up for a year, which was going for almost two weeks. But by that moment, a shortage of time began to appear, which is why, after a year of being on Gentoo, it was decided to abandon it - it took too much time to rebuild the "world". I decided to switch to Debian, which is still my main unix system to this day, 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 dispose of resources, there was a desire to raise some kind of online service. Initially, these were ordinary games, for example, Minecraft, which was gaining popularity at that time, or the good old CS 1.6.

By the way, the characteristic cubic character from Minecraft is still present on the R4SAS avatar.

After the games, I was drawn to web technologies. An unremarkable domain was bought, on which a site with a small forum was formed for friends. The first experience of working with sites appeared.
Over time, the idea of the security of all administered resources, stored data and transport protocols for communication began to creep into my head. Thus, I began to study all the overlay networks that were known at that time. It was the end of 2014. Tor, despite the statements of the developers and the community about the security of communications with its help, did not attract my attention.

TOR did not interest Kirill, since, first of all, this tool is used to bypass locks. He had no such task. Also, Thor's architecture is not completely decentralized, if you look closely. After the downfalls of the TOR network due to the collapse of consensus (read, several servers in the hands of famous people) over the past three years, the desire to somehow monitor this network has completely disappeared. "Centralized decentralization of the network? No thanks," R4SAS explained.

I2P was immediately hooked by a crazy idea: one-way tunnels and the absence of any central nodes. I bet he had to go through a lot of documentation to figure out how this could work!

That's when I met I2P. First in Java. 3 months of use strongly tied me to the network. Although I didn’t write anything to the IRC2P chat at that time, I actively read the documentation on the network, watched the development progress and ... cried from the Java VM: 400 MB of RAM for a service that barely squeezed kilobytes of data through itself, didn't suit me at all. So I lost interest in the web... for about a year.
Returning to the network, I installed Java I2P again, but not for long, because. soon learned about the appeared client in C ++. During the year that I was away, orignal entered the development arena. By the time I arrived, there were a lot of interested people in the Moose team (original [orignal] - "elk" in Canadian French, approx. acetone) who in any way helped write code, documentation, catch bugs, or just chatted on the channel # ru in 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 raw text processing, I wanted to remove the enumeration of nicknames unknown to the reader, but still left them. I'm sure these people have done a lot to inspire R4SAS to what he's doing today on the project. Even if it was unconscious on their part, but this is how the free community lives: new code is born on the basis of the ideas and enthusiasm of its predecessors.

By that time, i2pd was on version 2.5.0 [March 2016]. Packages were built during releases by hagen. But he did not upload to the debian/changelog repository. When I was already corny tired of waiting for hagen to push the changelog and packages into the release on a kick, I first started communicating with the development team. At that time, my working system on my home PC was Windows. The first thing I did in i2pd was the implementation of a normal assembly in the MSYS2 system without dependencies on Microsoft Visual Studio. My first commits in 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 comes in. Accordingly, the first online resource in I2P, as it usually happens, is what? That's right, personal site r4sas.i2p.

Later on, other projects appeared around him that were of interest to me. For example radio.r4sas.i2p, which was raised out of interest and to test i2pd's ability to work with streams. This made it possible to catch some of the bugs that prevented the use of audio streaming within I2P.

A year and even more so two years ago, a more or less stable sound transmission was a great achievement and partly a success in terms of the tunnels built. The other day I was watching a series on an online movie theater that won't open without workarounds. I was very surprised: i2pd on a smartphone allowed to receive streaming video (480p) with minimal plugging (I used an output proxy to get into the clearnet). On the scale of a couple of years, the active development of I2P is clearly visible - now luck 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 the suspicion that the IRC2P administration had access to personal correspondence.

wiki.ilita.i2p with a logo slightly referring to Center E

How many successful coincidences, and sometimes outright self-indulgence, as a result, form global infrastructures. Like an elitist encyclopedia, the name ILITA IRC is both ironic and humorous.

As for the maintenance and payment of 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 (abuse) arrive at services that are still looking at the clearnet (this was with OpenNIC). In terms of finances, I wouldn’t say that it’s hard, but there were times when you had to pay for a car, but there were no 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 in the same way that we help them by developing i2pd, which they use for their own purposes.
Network involvement is the main driver: I can't imagine I2P without a huge part of the resources that enthusiasts contain.

It is necessary to emphasize the atmosphere of "terrible darknets" from the first lips of a major admin: 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

I have been hosting public online services for several years as a hobby : DNS, anonymous proxy server and some others (priority in the I2P network). Thanks to this, I was lucky to get acquainted with the Community project. The Community Collective calls itself an association of crypto-anarchists. Of the community's public projects, git hosting is mostly known . This is a very original project and I became curious to write to them within the framework of this material.

We, as anarchists, oppose the power of man over man and all forms of centralized government. Whether it's 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 fact, we say that our team works in the field of information technology: secure communications, privacy and anonymity in the network. By analogy, there are eco-anarchists, anarcho-communists, anarcho-feminists, and so on. The root "anarcho" defines agreement with the basic values of anarchism - self-organization, the absence of a vertical of power and the freedom of the individual as the highest value - and the rest of the communities determine their kind of interests on their own, designating it in the name of their philosophy for clarity.
I am glad that there are curious, well-read and erudite people, enthusiasts. In our experience, most activists are not picky about existing political, philosophical, and economic models. It follows that the term "crypto-anarchism" even scares someone, 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 network that 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 struggle for their freedoms and independence. The means of communication primarily affect 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, as we came to the conclusion that the anonymity that is needed for our struggle cannot be there. Even if the admin staff will protect themselves, 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 sites like telegram, this is profanity.

The rapid transformation of the dark web from a hobby to a tool of mundane civil liberties seems a little utopian, as the average user is relatively new to VPNs and tends to regard it as a panacea, but in general this line of thought is much more useful to people than official propaganda claims 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 the participants in the article together, without indicating the authorship of each thesis, in order to emphasize the general consonance of people from different free projects.

The administrator of a free / open service is not a job, it's a calling.
Do not forget to focus on the security of data: both your own and the users of the resource. Do not 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 pick out information from customers. Hypocrisy will kill the administrator's own interest, and at the same time his spiritual ideals and, as a result, all the work done.
Revolutions don't work when you look at history. The Theory of Small Things works. Just do what you know how to do in the right direction in your opinion. Join movements and projects, enrich them with your own ideas, and enrich your mind with the ideas of others.
Make your project not like a revolution or a guerrilla war (although often your actions will have a similar effect), but rather like a game. The Playing Man will push the Consumer to the back of history.
You can start your journey from anywhere. You can simply create a resource that you think will be of interest to users. You can initially study the market for the necessary services and start a project that is obviously in demand. A lot depends on the skills you have and the perseverance to get 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 does not fit well into the capitalist system: no one earns on users secretly and no one demands money directly. Free projects are born and live by the forces of the most ordinary people, who do not always have a specialized education or money pulling their pockets behind their backs. Unlike flashy commercial projects, independent small-scale ventures have a soul - the motives and care of administrators who tinker with their offspring on a weekend evening. As you can see 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 hangouts 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 part of a small project that serves my e-mail, rather than buying another forced paid subscription. Autonomous projects give me hope that self-organization of people is possible and the hanging dependence on a handful of masters is not a sentence, but a call to fight. In the end, human self-respect is not another slogan of the military registration and enlistment office, but a source of energy for emancipation. Unless, of course, there is still a spark of freedom and individuality on the other side of the screen.

For a personal introduction to free services, I recommend the Riseup list , the Fediverse server list, and Co-op cloud . These are good starting points for diving into the world of ethical online services.

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