I wouldn’t doubt it, though MW seems hard to manage.

This looks interesting.

Seems like it’s still early days yet, but are there plans to add things like namespaces and categories?

I’m not thinking of a single distributed wiki, but something more like Fandom where you can edit pages on other wikis that are federated to yours.

Easy hosting isn’t quite the issue. Dokuwiki is trivial to self host. What I’d like something that’s a happy medium between requiring account creation to edit pages and letting literally every rando with an IP address go to town.

I’d like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it’s open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.

I’m getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.

First the centralized (I prefer to say “urbanized”) nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.

However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who’s hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by “last comment” which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it’s not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won’t bother.

I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.

The smell of decades of second-hand smoke emanates from the threadbare carpet and faded walls, mixed with the faint smell of chlorine from the indoor pool down the hall. Stale donuts and cold coffee sit at the continental breakfast bar. There are a few small tables and chairs. A coffee table is surrounded by a few overstuffed armchairs and a sofa. A check-in desk stands across the entrance hall from the breakfast area, but the night auditor is nowhere to be found. At the end entrance hall, door-lined corridors stretch into the distance to the left and right. The parking lot can be seen outside the windows, lit by the monochromatic light of sodium vapor lamps, but the darkness and driving rain obscure everything beyond. If there even is a beyond…

A low thump can be heard from behind one of the nearby doors, followed by the quiet clicking of tiny paws on the tile floor. The door creaks open, and a wet nose framed by whiskers pokes out, twitching a few times as its owner scents the air.

“Yay!” yips the little stranger “We’re on Earth. Finally I can meet a human!” Overcome with excitement, the creature trots into the hallway, nose to the ground drinking in the mélange of aromas. It’s covered in earthy brown fur. Its only clothing is a backpack stuffed to bursting. Its head is vulpine, but its body appears more like a new world monkey, with a broad back and thicker limbs. Its sinewy tail, long enough to touch its nose, is held aloft with the end curled up. It walks on all fours, but all four six-toed paws look like grasping primate hands, save for the extra thumbs.

It prances over to the glass door to the pool and rears up on its hind feet. It presses its forepaws against the glass. The tips of its digits are hairless, with grayish-black skin like an orangutan. Each digit is tipped by a sharp iron-enriched claw. The underside of each digit possesses a carnivoran paw pad, and there’s another arrangement of pads on its palms. The three palmar pads indicate the creature is a male. “Ooh, mama Redclaw, can I go swimming? Please?” He suddenly realizes there’s no one else around.

“Mama redclaw? Papa Sunfire? Mama Moonshine? Papa Hearthfire?” He runs back to the room he came out of. Finding nobody, he tries knocking on a few of the doors with his tail. Eventually he walks into the check-in area and puts his paws up on the counter, his pointed ears and wet nose barely visible from behind. “Anyone?” He begins crying, rills of crimson lacrimal fluid dribble from the corners of his black lips, matting the brown fluff of his chest. “Anyone?” He lets out some ugly gurgling sobs, which echo unheard down the halls.

I’m not familiar with the setting, but I’m getting cosmic horror vibes.

The first part of this story reminds me of a recurring nightmare I have involving going under anesthesia. I have mild asthenophobia (fear of losing consciousness) which can blow up into hypnophobia (fear of falling asleep) in my darker moments, so I found the scenario suitably creepy.

It sounds like you’re aiming for cosmic horror here. Interesting stuff. My one actionable criticism would be to split the text into paragraphs.

Maybe I could post some of my stories here…

The name means nothing to today’s youth

Story time: When I was a kid in the late 90s, there was a fad for toy walkie-talkies at my school. I was obsessed with seeing how far I could get my signal, which wasn’t very far given the likely minuscule power.

The teachers decided to capitalize on this trend by inviting a representative of a local ham club to speak at our school. I was absolutely floored when I learned you could talk around the world. Two things kept me from pursuing my license at the time. There was still a code requirement, and nobody for the life of me could tell me what lunch meat had to do with wireless communication.

Initially not very powerful. The movement was most popular among the missionaries (naturally) as well as on the planet Hearthside. The tide turned when a dissolutionist preacher on Hearthside managed to convince half of the Bright Way’s private army (an order of warrior monks called the Knights of the Sun) to join the dissolutionists.

As for how the PD’s were treated by the wider clergy, a lot of them were sent to the Outer Belt to get them out of the way. The Outer Belt was the home of the missionaries (as it’s close to interstellar space) as well as former ecclesiastical slaves both manumitted and runaways, who formed the nucleus of the radical secularists that would become the Partisans.

I summarize things better here, here, and here.

I really like your technical style of worldbuilding. I’m fond of the little details that grand sweeping stories gloss over.

So they do address what the predators in Zootopia eat. I’m blind (literally, I have a guide dog) and I guess there was a visual reference to it somewhere that I missed. I was so irritated that the whole point of the film was about predators not eating prey anymore but it didn’t address what they ate instead.

The Pious Dissolutionists are what you’re looking for. The Bright Way started monetizing the tech they invented in order to fund the missionaries, but that little side hustle turned into all they cared about. The Pious Dissolutionists wanted to purge the organization of its corporate interests. (Incidentally, my avatar is their symbol. The red arch represents an element of Claravian sacred art whereby a golden arch would be drawn behind a saint’s head, analogous to a halo. The usual Bright Way symbol is the bare “star and gear” without the arch.)

While I’m contemplating moving away from hard numbers, my stories say the trip from Focus to Sol takes about 250 years, and 12 days pass for the missionaries in sim. I think that would be way too fast.

Every few sim hours someone ducks into the OS to check on things in realtime. There’s also a leasemind (weak nonsentient AI) that monitors the ships systems and can preemptively pull someone out of sim if it sees a problem developing. There’s also a live mission controller monitoring the ships systems via ansible who can yank one of them out of sim if needed.

Nose Balm

Keeping one’s nose wet is an important part of yinrih grooming. A wet nose helps aid the sense of smell, and a dry chapped nose is uncomfortable. A glistening wet nose is also considered aesthetically pleasing.

In addition to the nose’s natural mucus, wetness is maintained with an occasional lick. In dry climates, however, nose balm is used to prevent the nose from drying out. Unlike human lip balms, which are often mildly flavored, cynoid nose balm is invariably scentless. Indeed, many brands are advertised as having “negative odor”, possessing no smell of their own but enhancing surrounding odors.

This is a bottle of nose balm. It’s fairly representative of pill bottles and other similarly sized containers. The only real curve ball compared to its Terran equivalent is the ring on the cap. The ring serves two main purposes.

For yinrih who live planetside, the ring helps them fish the bottle out of a backpack with their tail. For spacers, the ring is slipped on one of the digits while the bottle is open and in use in order to keep the lid from floating away without having to sacrifice an entire paw just to hold the lid. The outer thumb is used most often for this purpose.

A more subtle feature of these sorts of containers is the texture on the lid. It’s not just there for grip. It also helps the yinrih identify the bottle by touch alone. The texture, together with the overall size, shape, and mass of the bottle, differentiates it from other similar containers nearby.

There are other similar items that a yinrih typically keeps on their person, whether in a wallet around the right foreleg or a larger bag on the chest, back, or belly. Paw wax protects the paw pads against surfaces that are hot or have irritating chemicals. perfumes as well as perfume remover (for when one’s natural musk is deemed more appropriate) are packaged similarly. There are salves for treating minor cuts, which act to both treat the wound and cover it like a bandage.

How many species are sapient? All members of the kingdom animalia including microscopic animals like water bears and face mites?

Oh this is great!

I’d love to learn more about this religion! Does it specifically mandate slavery or is it more of a “the slavers happen to believe in this religion” thing?

The Bright Way is dedicated to finding extraterrestrial intelligence, or as they say bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh. They start out benign, but once they start sending out interstellar missions they realize they can’t fund their work on donations alone. They start monetizing the vast array of tech they’ve invented in order to get to that point, at first to fund mission work, but they gradually lose sight of why they’re making money and concentrate on just making more money.

Slavery in this context is a form of debt servitude one is consigned to if they can’t pay their tithes. Treatment of slaves varied greatly. On the yinrih’s homeworld of Yih, slaves were de facto treated as property. On the planet Hearthside, which was a hotbed of traditionalist movements opposed to the Bright Way’s pecuniary interests, serfdom was treated more like an assistance program to help the disadvantaged gain technical skills. Institutions on Hearthside would even “buy” slaves from Yih (really taking on their debt) in order to save them from harsh treatment on the homeworld, as can be seen in this story.

Regarding the Partisans, they got your typical cult of personality surrounding Firefly the Apostate (their leader), but there’s also a literal cult, which emerged more or less organically without the government’s input, that worships the Great Leader a la the Emperor of Mankind from 40K. The Partisan government goes back and forth between persecuting them as they do religion in general, and cynically promoting the cult as a means of control.

How quickly can a passenger return themselves to a nominal “real-time” experience if the ship, say, detects something notable that is worth slowing down to investigate?

Time perception can be altered more-or-less instantly, though it causes phantom nausea in the process. In the case of womb ships, there is the simulacrum (or just sim), which is the realistic Matrix-like environment designed to keep you sane where time is sped up, and the operating system environment, which is less Matrix and more Tron (I describe it as like being in a synthwave music video). Time passes normally in the OS, and while you do not have to leave the sim to interact with the outside world, events happen so quickly that it’s impossible to process them, so checking the ansible for messages from back home, confirming the ship’s course, controlling micro mechs to do maintenance EVAs, etc, are done in the OS.

Eloi vs Morlocks?

The Mass Router

Kid: “Mom, can we get a star gate?”

Mom: “We have a star gate at home.”

The star gate at home:

Long ago, when we humans were still squatting in a ditch poking berries up our noses, the yinrih discovered subspace, which they called the underlay. They quickly learned how to send information through the underlay faster than light, instantly in fact, but transporting matter proved illusive.

It wasn’t so much putting matter in or taking it out. The problem was momentum. An object egressing the underlay retains all the momentum from its point of ingress. If you ingress the underlay in a space station in low orbit over a planet and egress at the surface, you’ll be traveling at mach 20 relative to your point of egress.

The first thing they figured out was how to flush Newton’s laws of motion down the toilet. This resulted in many technological wonders such as force projectors, which generate a reactionless force normal to their surface when a voltage is applied, and retribution fields, which are force fields that absorb the kinetic energy of incoming projectiles and release that energy in a concentrated blast of concussive force back at the attacker^[1]. But while they had mastered force manipulation of objects in realspace, the same was not so for objects in the underlay.

Approximately one year after First Contact, a group of Claravian research monks perfected the impulse buffer, which absorbs the momentum of objects egressing the underlay. Because there were yinrih on Earth with access to a fabricator, they were able to establish a mass router trunk between Sol and Focus right away, allowing the missionaries to return home, and most importantly, bring their human friends with them.

But there’s one catch: The mass router is a claustrophobic nightmare. There are both mass and volume limits to what can be sent through the underlay, meaning that only one person can be transported at a time. There’s enough room for a person and maybe a few bags depending on how high up the chonk chart the person is. Mass routers look like the unholy offspring of an MRI machine and an iron lung. You have to be sealed in a very small cylindrical space. If in a gravity well, you get a bed to lie on. If in microgravity, you strap into a harness. The sensation of ingressing and egressing the underlay feels like your whole body falling asleep for a split second.

Savvy readers will note the use of the term router and correctly guess its mechanism of operation. It shunts a bubble of realspace containing the person into the underlay, fragmenting that bubble into billions of discreet packets. From the perspective of a hypothetical observer embedded in the underlay, these packets appear discontiguous, and can take separate paths to reach their destination. However, and this is important, from the perspective of a person within one of these packets, the space is still contiguous. If a box containing an ant were to be sent via mass router, the ant could travel from one end of the box to the other without noticing a difference. Or it could if the traversal weren’t instantaneous. There is no ontological question that what exits is the same entity that entered.

“But what happens if a packet is dropped?” I hear you cry. Well, the entire bubble containing your mass, called a flow is harmlessly shunted back into realspace at the router that dropped the packet, provided the router absorbs your momentum correctly.

Where there are routers, there are routing protocols. Mass Routing Protocol (MRP) is used to dynamically build paths from point to point in a mass router network, as well as coordinate mass flows within that network. Firewalls can prevent unwanted intruders from egressing at a particular router, and route poisoning can be used to hijack a person’s mass flow and make it egress somewhere it wasn’t supposed to.

Some people, on four legs or two, harbor misconceptions about how mass routers work. Some people think your body is digitized and sent over the internet. Others, drawing on ancient superstitions regarding demons lurking in the underlay, believe that mass routers may allow demons to invade realspace^[2].