What Makes Techrights a Community

Community is when a bunch of people who know one another (online or in person) get together and discuss shared interests, sometimes directly collaborate, and work towards common goals. It's not (necessarily) about kinship or class. The term "business community" is a two-word joke.

Contrariwise, "blogger" is a person working in solitude to write down thoughts, based on little recent (or current) interaction, except maybe with "the news".

About a week from now Techrights turns 20.

The site didn't start as a solitary project, it was Shane and I who ran a campaign against the Microsoft-Novell patent deal.

Regarding IRC (2008-present), it wasn't a one-person channel or just Shane and I. The channel was set up by Keith (Slated.org). I had known him from USENET for years (I admired his wisdom and technical take on GNU/Linux, which he shared in prominent groups) and the channel was soon occupied or casually frequented by my "USENET friends" or people I knew mostly from C.O.L.A. (L.A. is for "Linux Advocacy"), not Techrights or BN (2006). The USENET newsgroups that linked to the site helped as well. For the record, I did personally meet some of the "lads" from USENET (Mark for example). Some of them are still in touch, even as recently as years ago (Mark helped a lot).

In that sense, the Techrights community is actually older than 20. In IRC at the moment, "tessier" (the sys. admin. of the site) is online and I knew him from USENET. This predates the Microsoft-Novell patent deal, it goes back to the days of SCO.

People who never had an online community will never understand what that word ("community") even means. Each and every person has some limited capacity (not just physical capacity, also mental and technical). Communities magnify capacities through organised collaboration, such as the collaboration we had for protesting/opposing the Microsoft-Novell patent deal. We fought with words, some did with placards. Were we effective? Heck, some people tell me (still) that I'm the person who "killed Novell" (it wasn't me, not personally) and the last CEO of Novell was agonising over this even 13 years later.

SLAPPs (or threads thereof) as a form of recognition of the impact.

Communities can accomplish a lot. They cannot be "bought" and "sold", they're based on trust, mutual respect, and shared ideology.

In legal circles, we've enjoyed a community of professionals who helped even before the Legal Aid became available. We never got charged even a penny to stave off EPO SLAPPs.

Communities, unlike companies, are extremely difficult to crush. █