First, recap: what is #JupitersGhost ?

Jupiter's Ghost is a community drive, creative commons cc-by-sa licensed podcast about the crew of a deep space vessel in the distant future.

It's supported by an in character social network and some other stuff.

Think Star Trek, but actually centering community values and not centering the military. It's the culmination of years of work, and something I've really cared about for a long time.

It's also probably the most popular thing I've ever personally done, with the first episode clocking in well over 30k downloads so far.

You can listen to our first two episodes at https://intergalactic.computer or wherever you find podcasts.

Those episodes are old now, becuase I had too many other things on my plate to give the show the love it needed to keep happening. First, my work commitments skyrocketed and consumed most of my free time, and then I quit my job and spent a year overhauling and rebuilding our businesses.

Along the way, several of my core contributors also had radical upheaval in their lives and ... well, next thing I knew two years had passed.

We have most of episode 3 recorded and I could probably edit it and release it, but I'm not happy with it.

I'm not happy with it becuase it's all my ideas. It is good, it is funny, but it's also basically entirely things that I wrote, and it features fewer external contributions than the first two episodes.

There is room in this show for me to write plots and scripts and, frankly, I'm good at it. I'm funny, and people like the things I write.

But my goal isn't to write this show, my goal is to write @jandrews and to have the rest of the show grow organically. This can and does work, but we don't currently have a good system for collaboration.

The existing infrastructure is a WordPress site with bbpress and buddypress and a groups plugin and ... I mean, it works but you'd have to be very highly motivated to deal with it becuase it is Messy and Conplicated and Fragile, and it's missing some important stuff (like the ability to share audio clips!)

It's too complicated. It needs to be simpler.

Simpler to interact with. Simpler to understand. Simpler to get started. Simpler to participate.

We need a wiki, we need storage, we need a place to plan episodes and a place for players/participants to leave story hooks for one another.

We have a matrix room and a goto social server. I want there to be a forum, but I don't think bbpress is the answer and maybe the forum just needs to be the matrix room.

I don't know, but I am figuring it out. I'm exploring different technological solutions, but I am also embracing the idea that no given technology solution will be sufficient.

Which brings me to our immediate next steps:

Immediate next steps for #JupitersGhost

I'm looking for crew members for the Jupiter's Ghost.

I'm looking for people to run other settings. ( see https://intergalactic.computer/social/ships-and-settings/ )

We're organizing on matrix right now, but I'll be setting up a standing video call for Sunday evenings (5:30 eastern) for new contributor onboarding and episode planning.

If you want in to either thing, hit me up.

I'm also looking at setting up a mail server or an allow-list fediverse server for planning in place of a forum.

We'll do account generation by invite and by hand, rather than through an automated process. We'll set up a wiki in a git repo and build the wiki from there.

There's no need for us to be clever. I'm putting people into places where there used to be technology.

We'll also open things up for more single person episodes and focus a little less on the Big episodes. The Big episodes will come out when they come out. The little episodes will happen a lot more often.

So, if you're looking at the state of the world and wishing to escape to a far future where these problems are history, and instead we have entirely new problems, reach out.

Learn about what we've done so far at https://intergalactic.computer/social

But this is a community project. Bring yourself, bring your stories, consider me a facilitator (and not a producer/director/etc.) It's not *my* story. It's for everyone. There's room for everyone.

Why should Gene Rodenbury and George Lucas (and Paramount/Oracle/Larry Ellison and Disney) control our vision of the future?

Why should Larry Ellison get to decide which stories are real Star Trek and which ones are illegal?

Why should Bob fucking Iger have any say about who can and can't tell stories about the jedi?

Fuck that.

Culture should belong to communities, and that's why I started #JupitersGhost and the #solarFederation

This is your opportunity to tell the stories that matter to you and the people you care about.

You don't need my help or my permission, but I am offering both. CC-BY-SA

If you don't know where to start, I'm an open ear.

If you do know where to start, I'll stay out of your way but I'm happy to chat.

I went back through the #JupitersGhost tag and boosted some older posts and discovered something interesting.

It's been almost *exactly* a year since the last time I tried to revive this project, and in that time my ideas have not evolved significantly.

That says to me that I was on the right track a year ago, and just got overwhelmed with the logistics.

I'm not overwhelmed, but I am worried about the future, and some escapist, community drive, shared world science fiction seems like a good way to feel better about the future.

For now, if you find yourself wanting to participate, message me here.

So this is what I'm going to do today:

- Reinstall debian on my cheapest VPS,
- kick everything that is currently there over to other servers
- Point a domain name at it
- Set up a basic tilde server with a decent getting started MOTD, on box email (no outbound smtp, but can check mail through pop and imap)
- Set up an IRC server island and bridge it in to our matrix room (so that folks can join IRC or Matrix, rather than having to do both)
- Deploy some kind of messaging board software (Bulletin Board and Jelly? An actual news server?)
- Set up some basic help files, and a version controlled wiki that can only be edited by logged in users over ssh.
- Deploy a gemini server and also make the podcast episodes and lore available over gemini.

This creates some barriers to entry that I'm not thrilled about, but it gives me the most ability to Make Stuff for the universe and to shape it the way I want to shape it.

- *and* there are a bunch of ways to participate that do not involved sshing in.

(Email can be accessed from any email client.

I can set up some listener addresses to interact with the wiki, message boards, etc. from email.

If I do a news server, that can be access from any news reader.

If I do RSS feed stuff, as I tend to do, that can be accessed from any RSS reader.

Read only stuff can be snagged over the web or over gemini.

IRC and Matrix can have dedicated clients.

We can do audio log uploads with sftp using any ftp client, straight to a specific folder in the users home folder, and then I can set up a cron job to go collect them and notify everyone that they exist

and ...I could keep this list going, but I'm going to stop.)

- *and* ssh'ing in isn't actually that hard, and learning to operate a computer in that way 1) will feel appropriately scifi to people who don't do it on a regular basis, or at least it used to to me when I first started 2) is a valuable skill to pick up.

So uhhh

time to stop talking and start doing?

Okay update.

Debian installed.

Everything else migrated.

First broken thing fixed. Found another broken thing. Working on that.

In the meantime, apache is installed. /~ is working.

MOTD has been lightly customized, and a getting started script now exists.

I think I have email working, but I recall doing this to be a real pain in the ass the last time I did it and ... at least as of right now, it just appears to be working without issue? So I'm sure I haven't done something yet, and I'll have to start testing soon.