3.9 KiB
Bitreich
{ Researching this on-the-go, send me corrections, thanks. ~drummyfish }
Bitreich is a small, obscure underground group/movement of programmers who greatly value minimalism/simplicity, oppose the evil and degeneration of modern mainstream technology and aim for making the world a better place mainly through simpler technology. They seem to belong to the cluster of "minimalist programmer groups", i.e. they are similar to suckless (which in their manifesto they see as a failed project), reactionary software and our very own LRS, sharing many values such as minimalism, Unix philosophy, preference and love of the C language, carrying on some of the hacker culture heritage, though of course they also have their own specifics that will make them different and even disagreeing with us and others on occasion, e.g. on copyleft (unlike us, they seem to greatly prefer the GPL), terminology (yeah, they seems to prefer "open source") and probably also things like privacy (though the craze doesn't seem to go too far, many have listed their real names and addresses) etc.
According to the gopherhole Bitreich started on 17.8.2016 -- the founder (or at least one of them?) seems to be 20h (Christoph Lohmann according to the user profile), a guy formerly active in suckless (can be found on their website), who even gave an interview about Bitreich to some radio/magazine/whatever. It seems Bitreich originated in Germany. As of 2023 they list 12 official member profiles (the number of lurker followers will of course be a much high number, there seem to be even bitreich subcommunities in other countries such as Italy). They are mostly present on gopher (gopher://bitreich.org), which they greatly promote, and IRC (ircs://irc.bitreich.org:6697/#bitreich-en). There are also Tor hidden services etc.; their website at bitreich.org seems to be purposefully broken in protest of the web horror.
Some of their ideas and philosophy seems to be very based, e.g. preference of KISS/older protocols (gopher, ftp, IRC, ...), "users are programmers" (opposing division into users as consumers and developers as overlords), "bug reports are patches", "programs can be finished" etc.
Bitreich is also about humor and fun (sometimes so much so that it's not clear if something is a joke or serious stuff -- maybe because it's partly both). They invented analgram, an authentication method based on analprints (alternative to fingerprint authentication). They put a snapshot of their source code into an actual Arctic vault in Greenland, to be preserved for millennia. Often there appear parodies of whatever is currently hyping in the mainstream, e.g. NFTs, "big data", AI, blockchain etc. { There's also some stuff going on with memes and cooking recipes but TBH I didn't get it. ~drummyfish }
Some interesting projects they do:
- Bitreichcon: annual conference, running since 2017. Their slides can be downloaded in plain text.
- Bitreich radio
- Day Of The GrParazyd: point and click adventure game. { Didn't even take a look at this yet, sorry, no idea what it really is :D ~drummyfish }
- The Gopher Lawn: directory/index of gopherspace, categorizing gopherhole links.
- The Gopher Times: a very cool printable magazine (in both pdf and plain text),
git clone git://bitreich.org/tgtimes. - A number of smaller utilities/programs and parody stuff (see their gopherhole).
- Keeping infrastructure to host stuff they see as valuable.
- ...