Metaverses

FLAME ON

I’ve been spending lots more time in the toki pona universe. I’ve been reading toki pona, speaking toki pona, and living as a member of the toki pona community. It’s a village, a place of its own. It is a network ghost island floating through the ether of the linluwi (toki pona for internet, network, web: linluwi laso (blue/green network) is one name for ecosystem). Hyperstition eat your heart out; this is the teaching of CCRU coming true. Who knows what radical forms this will take?

FLAME OFF

Lately I’ve met a fair number of cool people on the internet. How nerdy is that? But I’m interacting with interesting people my age as we participate in a hobby. We all have at least one interest in common: toki pona itself. We often have several other passions we share: music (of different kinds), computers (in different ways), and languages (all different styles); many of us are queer. Of course, the community is far from homogenous: there are elements of all kinds, characters of all sorts. Not all of the speakers of toki pona interact with one another at all: there are generations of speakers separated across different communication media. Of course, they all communicate over the internet, but the way we can use computers to talk to one another are many.

Early toki pona speakers used forums and made web pages. Many of its early pages were hosted on geocities, which went away. The early forums were also hosted by yahoo, but they went over to <aside>This literally reads like something out of the CCRU’s writings. Note to self: revisit the CCRU.</aside> a self-hosted forum. In the meantime, many active forum users still use facebook, and the web page tradition still lives strong. Also, there is a wikipedia clone, since the toki pona wikipedia was removed. And many others blah blah blah get to the point Preston.

Discord sucks you in like the fae. Someone said that to me on a voice call last night; we were in there chatting for four hours. It’s like spending time together again. It’s like going to a party again. The beauty of it is its completeness; this is also its terror. It sucks you in and eats you up; it’s an at-all-times and at-all-places party that never turns off; it goes and goes and goes and you can never leave because the party is always beginning. Some of these servers are pretty busy. They are like spaces, or ethnicities. Some are based around games<aside>, but the best are based around hobbies. And the best are large. Active. So active that they support satellite servers that orbit like kitchens hover at the periphery of a party where you can go when the main server is overwhelming.

I use two toki pona servers, mainly, though I’m in about half a dozen. There’s a big one that’s the main landing pad. It’s actualy an English-speaking server, but some of the people there are really fabulous toki pona speakers. The very creator of the language is an active participant with whom I interact often. She seems to think that I speak the language decently—she sent me a friend request and a personal message thanking me for the help in the teaching section of the server. Not that this really matters: the point is that this server is quasi-official.

The second server is smaller, and it’s toki pona only. As far as I know, all of its members are also members of the big toki pona server; I think that its administrator is also an administrator of the big server. But this server is far quieter. It really isn’t a server at all, just a nice group chat. It’s a place where we can explicitly complain about our feelings in the main server, just like the kids who want to have a conversation are bothered by the kids who want to dance. But we enter through the front door, right into the thick of it.