Last Sync: 2025-10-12 14:09 (Mobile)

Catholic Intranet.md

@@ -1,9 +1,15 @@
-	If the Amish, or Benedictine monks, built an inter/intra-net, what would it look like?
+	If the Amish, or Benedictine monks, or medieval peasants, built an inter/intra-net, what would it look like?
 
 The internet has a lot of problems. It is not just that there are some bad actors. Actually, the very shape of it incentivizes bad actors. It is malformed. We should not be surprised that it has devolved to the point it is today.
 
 I don't think this technology is going away. It has too many benefits. But how can we radically re-form it? Let's look at a few aspects:
 
+# The World Wide Web Monetizes Attention
+This has been pretty much beat to a pulp. The WWW wants you to use it. It doesn't want to help. It wants to extract. It wants to become the dominant thing. This is, to put it frankly, evil.
+
+The solution is self-hosting. But self-hosting has two issues. Firstly, not everyone can do it. It's not easy. Maintaining a server is a part-time job. There's a reason we have tended towards economies of scale in computing (though, there are also dis-economies of scale at play too). Grandma isn't going to self-host. Any solution we come up won't be self-hosted, actually.
+
+We can't be antisocial. That second issue is actually my second point.
 # The World Wide Web is Flat
 The web as we know it now is very flat. You immediately connect to the same server as everyone else. (I know it isn't exactly this simple, and that distributed computing systems are actually at play, but the FUNCTION is as if they were a monolith.)
 
@@ -15,11 +21,16 @@ We want a hierarchical network. We want federation not simply because of reliabi
 # The World Wide Web is Anonymous
 Anonymity can lead to a lot of bad actions. But it is motivated because exposing your entire identity to the entire world is dangerous. Hierarchy solves this problem. It permits us the freedom to be safely known.
 
-The World doesn't want this decentralized approach to privacy so it resorts to oppressive social credit scores. The point 
+The World doesn't want this decentralized approach to privacy so it resorts to oppressive social credit scores. We don't want this. We already have social credit scores - it's called rapport with your neighbor. This is fine. Let's not supplant this. Let's build an Intranet that actually builds on top of this existing network of trust rather than trying to eschew it.
+
+# Characteristics of a Good Intranet
+- Community-sized. Not a server for every house: a server for every parish. (Maybe a server for every diocese to start?)
+- Fairly easy to maintain, using FOSS tools
+- Reconfigurable to meet the needs of a local community
 
 # A Day with the Catholic Intranet
 
-This morning, I've got to haul a few loads of grain to our neighbor across the county. It's a 45 minute drive, so I pull out my phone before hitting the road, to get it connected to the cab radio. I open up Symfonium, which has downloaded music from the community server. It's by no means an exhaustive library. It has some classics - Bach, Beethoven, and other recordings (which were public domain). My neighbor Jim ripped a bunch of CDs and put the mp3 files on there - he's pretty into Dave Brubeck. But a large swath of what's on here is stuff that our community has recorded themselves. A few things are files that have migrated over from community to community, too. I notice that the Hutchinson kids' album of Gregorian chant that they recorded last month is on the server now (my neighbor Bill is one of the admins, he and a few other folks are the only ones that can approve additions to the library). I tap on it to stream it.
+This morning, I've got to haul a few loads of grain to our neighbor across the county. It's a 45 minute drive, so I pull out my phone before hitting the road, to get it connected to the cab radio. I open up Symfonium, which has downloaded music from the community server. It's by no means an exhaustive library. It has some classics - Bach, Beethoven, and other recordings (which were public domain). My neighbor Jim ripped a bunch of CDs and put the mp3 files on there - he's pretty into Dave Brubeck. But a large swath of what's on here is stuff that our community has recorded themselves. A few things are files that have migrated over from community to community, too (I'm personally quite fond of the Appalachian Orthodox recordings that have made it onto here). I notice that the Hutchinson kids' album of Gregorian chant that they recorded last month is on the server now (my neighbor Bill is one of the admins, he and a few other folks are the only ones that can approve additions to the library). I tap on it to stream it.
 
 It's simply delightful. We don't have the same sort of novelty that people have with Spotify - but we have our own unique sort of novelty, and it's a novelty that I care all the more of, because it's my neighbor.
 
@@ -27,8 +38,11 @@ I'm midway through the Dies Irae when it cuts out and my son butts in over (the
 
 Back at the office I sit down at my computer to add a few receipts. I took pictures of the receipts and they auto-uploaded into the Immich instance on the server. I download the pictures from Immich and move them to my receipts folder (inside my documents). The whole documents folder syncs back up over Nextcloud. My wife (and secretary) gets the files quickly synced to her documents folder as well.
 
-File syncing of course extends beyond the family. It's easy to share any records and documents with anyone - just add the new choir member to the choir folder, and voila, they've got access to all the sheet music!
+File syncing of course extends beyond the family. It's easy to share any records and documents with anyone - just add the new choir member to the choir folder, and voila, they've got access to all the sheet music! 
+When people are working on documents simultaneously, Collabora is a great help.
+
+Nextcloud is nice but not for everyone. My neighbor Jonathan runs a fabrication business and for the engineering, they want more regimented version control and branching - which git is perfect for. So we also have a gitea instance on the community server (even though it's not strictly necessary for the use of git, it sure makes things nicer). 
 
 You might be wondering - where is this server anyways, and who's funding it? Well, it's at my neighbor James' house - he's got a really high-speed fiber line so it just made sense. The next parish over actually keeps theirs, well, at their parish! James is the system administrator - you talk to him if you've got any troubles. It's crowdfunded - it pays for the server hardware and the network connection, and a small salary for James. Since we use the thing a lot and can afford it my business donates a lot. But there's  a lot of not-so-well-off families that just use it free of charge.
 
-My neighbor Alex has his own server that mirrors ours. Alex is on a low-speed internet connection so he needs to have that local cache.
+My neighbor Alex has his own server that mirrors ours. Alex is on a low-speed internet connection so he needs to have that local cache.