Update 1.1
Suh Friend!
I recently announced my intention to move off of Meta products entirely and start this newsletter. The response has been wonderful. Thrilled to recognize old friends and to be reaching out to new ones. Thanks everyone for following along 🙏
Honestly it is a hard thing for me. It isn't the end of my public career however it does feel like the end of something. Lots of folks still know me from things like #livewithlarsen, work with folks like Pride Corner, or my tiktok stint. Certainty the closing of a chapter.
Which does mean we get to open a new one!!! I am thrilled to be moving into the future with y'all. For those folks new here, here is a bit of history of the projects that lead to Change Maker.
The Bunker Operations Repository (The Repo)
repo.bnkops.com is a peer-to-peer generated repository hosted and maintained by The Bunker Operations. It has a bunch of stuff on it, including a tonne of writing from yours truly.
The Repo details almost 18 months of learning how to develop and self-host web applications. I now consider it the first run attempt at developing a alternative platform for publishing community knowledge.
I also did a lot of study on the complete moral rot that has taken over the internet. This moral rot mirrors the real world and is driven by, as we know, the ruling 1% class. A few of my most recent rambling on this:
- In If you do politics who is reading your secrets - why you should de-corp your software stack I write at length about how our software choices are political. We are so used to the convience of instant cloud software that we are litterally handing the corporation the keys to our movements and enabling the concentration of weath, genocides, wars, and ecocides.
- Corporate social media platforms are now the grooming ground for facists. Like straight up, the revolution will not get likes and we should abandon the idea that we can "reason" our way out of our current circumstances. Not a single Nazi have chatted with at childrens story time protests has a reasonable brain cell.
- Here at home, the UCP governments attack on trans folks are accelerating, and will need to get more heightened to distract the public from the exponentially growing rates of homelessness, amputations, children dying in care, and sky rocketing food, housing, and social insecurity.
This sort of stuff bothered me deeply so I started learning about alternatives and writing about them. For example, you can learn how to install your own local newsletter software through this manual or how to run your own AI.
Change Maker
All the learning lead me to the realization that I needed a quickly deploy-able software suite for doing my own work and for those partners we where already providing support to. Wildly enough, nothing of this sort already existed. As far as I know, nobody has put together a full alternative to the leading corporate software in the political space; certainly not free and open source. And so, with that knowledge in mind, I have started curating the componenets of the system, and am working on getting it all together.
Change Maker is fundamentally different then any software in the space in that it allows you to own, physically, all of your data. As the system installs and serves itself locally, on your own device, we cannot access your system. You could develop a campaign entirely offline or on a closed network; it is all up to you.
Ever wanted to publish something however you knew Facebook would sic you with 14yr old neo-nazies who think slurs are edgy? Now you can.
Right now Change Maker is still in a development and testing stage. We are releasing code on each major internal milestone however installation does require computer literacy in using the terminal and deploying Docker applications. I hope, in the coming few months, to develop a smoother installation experience.
Code Releases
Password: Hurray!
Anyhow, i've had a exceptional year. It's been tough y'all. I imagine it gets much more tough before it gets better. Please do write to me anytime; a part of my labor is chit chatting about the future with good folks.
Safe travels friends,
Thatreallyblondehuman,
The Bunker Admin,
Reed.