My friend, Opensource Obscure, has been banned from Google+, apparently because Google+ requires you to use what we call your “real life identity”. Now, this sets us back again. I don’t really know why they picked him of all the hundreds of SL users who signed up for the service using their SL names, but it shows that “WE”¹ are as unwelcome there as we are on facebook. Which, actually, sets us far back.

Sure, it is true, as Joshua writes, that “it’s not the purpose of the venue” to provide a social network for pseudonymous users. But it was what we had hoped it would be.

And I think the driving force behind the disappointment at Google+ is not so much that there are no social networks that allow avatar names (because there are), but because, again, WE want to be accepted by the rest of the worlds population, and “live” alongside the rest of the normal users. The problem is just that, as long as we use someone elses service, we have to abide by their rules, which is why Stallman was right, and how far it actually sets us back. It’s the free as in freedom, not as in free beer, because I’d gladly pay for it as well. Heck, I paid about 240 Euros a month to LL when I got kicked, so, really, I’m willing to pay for my little piece of virtual space. But it needs to be free, in the way that I can do with it whatever I like to do with it. And that’s just incompatible with the business model of corporal social networks, or corporal networks in general.

I’m going to have a short speech next weekend about OpenSim in Frankfurt, which is a little weird, because it’s the first time in 5 or 6 years that I needed my RL name in connection with my internet publication. But anyway, I was to talk about all the cool things you can do with OpenSim, but this whole episode reminds me about the thing that’s really important to remember: That OpenSim is free, that it’s yours, and that you can use it in any way you want. I hope I can get that message across as well, since it’s something most people don’t usually think of.

But it got me thinking of how many things I actually use that are not free, and somewhat out of my hands. I’m using a lot of other google services (gmail, calendar, tasks, reader, docs) mostly because they make it so easy to synchronize data between our various computers and phones. But what if these services become unavailable to me, either because google “suspends” me as well (who knows, since I’m not using many real life credentials), or because they get discontinued, or even because google goes down the drain? (As unlikely as it sounds, it wouldn’t be the first time a big internet service would wane.) And the more I think of it, the more I’m uncomfortable with trusting any “services” that I can’t run on my own hardware, and in a paranoid moment I thought about which of these services I can actually run myself on my own hardware, and how.²

I’m still doing quite a bit myself, however, most of it is on the server I rented, and while it is technically “mine”, it’s still somewhat out of my control. But I’m rather inclined to see how much I can actually achieve with free software, and how it might change the way I use the net, and my life. There is something about using your own PC (the very one I’m writing this on) as the webserver it gets published on as well, and the machine that synchronizes with peripheral devices.

Now, I’m clueless, most of the time, and I’m certainly not trained in IT in any way, so it will be an interesting challenge. But as I’m left somewhat open on what to do on here, after I started OpenSim Creations and moved the publishing of my creations and OpenSim tutorials there, this might actually extend TGIB in a very nice way, to turn it into an anchor of my online and computer related activities, which are not just restricted to OpenSim.

For now, though, I’m left thinking about what I want to use the internet for at all, which really calls for a different blogpost, and a restructuring of the categories of this blog to begin with. So I’d just like to leave this one with the general warning of not neccessarily trusting Google+ with an SL account, and mentioning that Opensource Obscure is a really cool guy.

1. WE, a.k.a. the technocommunist pseudonymous virtual world users, a.k.a. THEM [↩]
2. And I’m probably a hypocrite by writing this all the while Steam is busy downloading Portal 2, which is 50% off today! [↩]