Hello! **The UNIX Philosophy**, as opposed to **The Appliance Philosophy**, can easily be explained by analogy to cars: **The Appliance Philosophy**: You have a slick, easy to use car. An automatic transmission "just works" whenever you press the gas; and a computer-assisted ABS system ensures you can slam the brakes on ice and get the intended behavior. You take the car in every 6 months to a service center which magically keep it working, and if anything goes wrong you call triple AAA to come out and handle it. The trade-off is a complete dependence on the service center, who may even deliberately cripple your right-to-repair your own property. **The Unix Philosophy**: You have a simple, functional car. Training is required to operate a manual transmission and to not skidlock the brakes on ice. Basic maintenence tasks like changing the oil and emergency tasks like changing a tire or jump-starting a battery are expected of you. The trade-off is transparency in all the parts and how to fix them, and flexibility to customize or modify the car as you see fit. Obviously, time is finite. Most things in life we just have to accept **The Appliance Philosophy**, and that is indeed how I treat my own car. But a few things in life we do get the chance to invest in mastering **The Unix Philosophy**, and even better if we can find trustworthy friends and communities to cover our weaknesses rather than strangers and megacorporations. The purpose of this post is to invite people to learn **The Unix Philosophy** as it applies to operating systems (Windows --> Linux) and social media (Discord --> IRC). Or just to come hang out with a hobbyist community that focuses on that goal. If you already know how to use IRC, you can ping search_social on #team at irc.ircnow.org . If you don't already know how to use IRC, you can try it out here: https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/irc.ircnow.org/team (any nick, no password). Just type search_social to ping me. If you have never used Linux or the command line before we can walk you through the process from the very beginning (you won't have to give up Windows, you'll just try Linux out). If you are more experienced we can help you learn to self-host services like a website on your own domain name or even your own private IRC server. If you are interested in gaming we host minetest servers (minetest is a free and open-source clone of minecraft) and can also show you how to self-host your own. Our next minetest minigames tournament is this Saturday at 2PM UTC (9AM CDT), or you can build freely on a minetest creative-mode server and see others' creations. Happy 1/3 mark of 2021 and a toast to #YearOfDecentralization!