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.

@ajroach42 I'm interested, but I want to get caught up in the flavour of this story before I jump into being a crew member.

Can I just...start writing with the tag?

@ajroach42 aside from the Aliens! page, are there any Randross-specific lore resources I should know about?

Contemplating the feasibility of playing a Randross monk or exchange student serving as a cadet...thoughts on either of these as feasible entrypoint for a crewmember?

@jakimfett One of the crew members in the first two episodes is a Randross. There *might* be a little more lore tucked away somewhere that @Username_Here_ASAP wrote when he came up with the Randross, but I don't know where it would be if it exists.

A Randross Monk sounds like a *ton* of fun. Exploring the religions of the Randross seems absolutely fascinating, and it's basically brand new territory, so you can have fun.

An exchange student serving as a cadet would also be a great place to enter things, and it'd give us a kind of fun source of conflict in the whole "culture clash" element (young folks tend to be less good at handling surprises and culture shock, you know?)

Either of those could be a lot of fun, and both of them would slot nicely in to the universe.

@ajroach42 @Username_Here_ASAP excellent.

I have followup questions:
1) What would a Randross know about Jupiter's Ghost before signing on? (cc @egowjr )
2) Where would a new crewmember embark?
3) Who do I talk to about getting on the ssh for this?

(...as a sidenote...I've found Matrix to have immense overhead from the sysadmin side, as well as quite a lot of difficulty with dropped and improperly delivered messages. Does the context necessitate a high security environment, or could something like XMPP suffice?)

@jakimfett @Username_Here_ASAP @egowjr

1) That depends on how/why they signed up. They probably had basic "solar federation history" lessons regardless, but they might have joined up:
- Because a member of the JG saved their life on a distant planet
- For course credit
- Because they've always dreamed of it.

Think about it like what your average person from the US might know about Vietnam. It varies from person to person, surely, but the general answer is not much.

2) Could be anywhere. Might meet up at a station or on a mission or take a shuttle to join the ship. TRansport ships are common enough.

3) Me! What username do you want, I'll get it set up.

4) I was already running matrix, so I stuck a room on our existing server. XMPP would be fine if we weren't already using matrix. an IRC or XMPP bridge would be great.

@ajroach42 @Username_Here_ASAP @egowjr

1) I can work with that. Thanks.

2) Glorious. I'll improvise.

3) I'd like jakimfett please, thank you!

4) That makes sense, and I'm mostly looking at it from an overhead-minimizing standpoint.

4.a) Is matrix the preferred rallying point on this for the moment?

4.b) ...I've tallied so far the wordpress site, a fedi instance, the ssh interface, and the matrix server...kinda hoping that the ssh interface can be a / the primary way to engage, as I'm very burnt out on making new accounts and joining new things, but I'd very much like to join in...somehow...for story, not for tech-wrangling.

4.c) The idea of being able to ssh into the roleplaying environment (as if connecting to the ship itself), check local emails, upload personal logs, contribute to the wiki via version control, etc very much appeals, however I'm not entirely sure if that was what you were going for here, or something else.

@jakimfett @Username_Here_ASAP @egowjr

Yeah, I have a lot of overhead I need to minimize.

There isn't a preferred rallying point at the moment. There are more people on matrix than anywhere else, but it's sparse.

We have:

Wordpress - This was originally intended to be the main thing, but I don't like the way it works, and that's how I ended up starting the SSH server.

GoTo Social - This is intended to be an in character/in universe fediverse instance that we use for promoting the show. This was my first attempt at doing something better than buddy press.

Matrix - We use matrix for a bunch of other stuff, and several of the folks who were already doing other stuff in Matrix with us were contributing to JG, so we set up a matrix room. It's .. not very active. Like, 10 messages in a week would be abnormal.

Tilde/SSH - This is very much in progress, as I do all the tech wrangling to make it the primary interface, but the goal is for this to be the primary interface.

I want to bridge the best bits of what we already have so it's accessible from within the tilde (IRC or XMPP to matrix bridge, migrate the web pages over, built out the wiki, maybe use the tilde server account as an identity for the gotosocial instance.)

Then, I want to wind down a bunch of stuff that isn't working (the wordpress site, buddy press, bbpress.)

Then add in email and a list server, and some in-universe custom scripts/applications and then it becomes a more immersive thing.

So yeah, 4.c is the goal. I'm still working on making it happen that way, but it is my hope that that's where we land.