Christian Acts
Christian Busch to the Rescue and other updates in this Project Dara newsletter for September 2024
Project Dara is relieved and delighted to announce that Christian Busch has come to the rescue and taken over hosting the Dara server.
Christian is not new to Dara and the German developer and entrepreneur was very involved in its earliest days with contributions ranging from building the first site to writing a whitepaper.
This unanticipated return is most welcome coming as it does at a conspicuously complex time for the decentralized publishing project. Project Dara adviser Bruce Li is to be thanked for facilitating the meeting and rapprochement which sees Chris return.
DARA ECOSYSTEM
In the past and now again Busch has questioned Project Dara’s business model and token utility. Since Dara’s ecosystem has not bloomed his concerns are proven well-founded and going forward the project must reexamine the model.
THE UNPUBLISHED WHITEPAPER
The whitepaper Christian wrote in 2021, and which was never published, describes a decentralized and sustainable model for a complete Web3 publishing ecosystem. Christian has generously made the paper available once more, an act of great kindness, and the 21-page document is being studied closely.
Certainly Dara has provided many tools for curation, but less so for creation — and that is at the heart of the document which finds its way so auspiciously back after three years.
It should be noted that Christian has obligations which preclude his pursuit of any development for Dara in the near future. Dara is nonetheless thrilled that its archives are running under his steersmanship and extremely grateful for his timely intervention.
ZWIBOOK
In other news Larry Sanger, President of the Knowledge Standards Foundation (KSF) is now selling and shipping ZWIBooks, USB flash drives containing Project Dara’s ZWI versions of the Project Gutenberg library with a bespoke reader software the Wikipedia founder made himself!
The first run of 128GB flash drives are numbered and signed by Larry, and Dara is now in possession of ZWIBook #7 which will be reviewed and showed off soon.
WIKIPEDIA DEATH ROW
Death Row is the Dara archive of Wikipedia articles that are nominated for deletion. The snapshot archives are packed up as ZWI files in compliance with the KSF standard.
The Knowledge Standards Foundation would like to add the complete Death Row archive to its decentralized knowledge store, the Encyclosphere, where people can “search and read 30 million articles from 33 encyclopedias in 12 languages.”
This news comes as a welcome vindication of the work done at Project Dara.
MASTODON
Project Dara is now on Mastodon after accepting an invitation from the good people at Project Gutenberg.
Dara is especially happy join the Fediverse given increasingly egregious and incalculable levels of shadow banning censorship which doubtless limit its reach on 𝕏.
There is no way to know the extent to which an account on 𝕏 is shadow banned and Project Dara has grave misgivings about what Twitter 2.0 understands by free speech when 𝕏 is turning the volume dials up and down, and doing so in a black box.
Mastodon functions like 𝕏 but the vibe is near diametric in its opposition, so commented by the Dara founder.
Project Dara, still known to some by its original honorific The Immutable, has no politics save the politics of “building an Ark to save learning from the deluge.” Thusly the project should require little persuasion to share its message in all quorum, and on all platforms.
There’s an ocean of work for The Immutable Project Dara but the tumults of its past, which Henry VIII would pale on hearing, are hopefully now in its wake.
Christian’s safe hands hold the tiller as the plucky project prepares a strategy for funding, the topic of the next Project Dara newsletter.
If you’d like to help or contact Project Dara please ping us on 𝕏or Mastodon or email immutabledara@gmail.com. If you would like donate to support its running and development please click here. Thanks
