Telekomumunisten have participated in CCC and Transmediale for many years.
This year, with 37c3 and Transmediale facing the pandemic, it looks like these events will happen remotely, if at all.
Having attended a few online conferences in the past few months, I've found the experience painful and mostly useless.
This is odd, since we've been doing interesting things online for decades now.
Trying to engage with bad online experiences based on commercial conferencing platforms and bulky web technology, made me remember the days of LambdaMOO, and how fun and inventive these user-built interactive text environments where.
Maybe it was simply easier when it was simpler. You had to learn weird commands, and type help a lot, but since it was all text, the technical bar of entry was still low. Once you mastered some simple commands making your own areas and objects and decorating yourself was as easy as writing.
Since we can also have links, these text environment can provide a core social baseline that links out to richer media without being constrained by it.
Also, these links don't just have to go to YouTube and Zoom, I'm also reminded of the projects of Michelle Teran, Jeff Mann and Graham Smith that I participated over the past few decades, like LiveForm:Telekinetics and others, that did so much more with the online space that we're seeing today.
Meanwhile Baruch Gottlieb and I have been working hard to bring our participant focused approach to online sessions, and wishing these conference events could do something better.
This is my starter kit for playing around with the moo software. It is based on toaststunt a fork of a fork of the original LambdaMOO from the 90s, blightmud a mudclient, and wetty a javascript ssh client.
If you have git installed and docker running, you can run my kit if you clone this repo, cd into it and type:
./moo
Once it's up and running, you can open this link to connect: http://127.0.0.1:3000
You can also access it with telnet or a mudclient on port 7777
This is only accessible on your own computer (127.0.0.1), and so only for yourself, however, the tricks you learn will be useful when Telekommunisten launch our assembly, which will be persistent and accessible to all.
Any building you do in your version will not be part of our shared world, but it's good to play with and learn on until the persistent world is online.
The way to learn is experiment, search the web for "LambdaMOO", this is a 30 year old platform, there is a ton of history and information online, and yeah, type help a lot and read what it says on the screen.
Telekommunisten Discord server is a good place to ask for help for now.