If it’s your first time here, welcome! If it’s not, welcome back!
Assilvestrar is a Portuguese word that roughly means “making it wild again”. This has also been, for the past two years and change, a project I’ve been building, with the aim of creating of an online community that would roughly share the same values that I do. During this time, there have been some posts written (if you know Portuguese, you can have a look here, but I’ve also developed an infrastructure that would facilitate the community-building aspect.
There have been three subjects that have been the main bread of this place: agriculture, technology, and religion. I understand now that these three subjects (it’s triads all the way up/down) roughly correspond to an unity that it’s quite important for me: body, mind, and spirit. I’ve been trying to understand the myriad different ways that these three subjects interact with one another, and how they could be used to better understand each other. These are also the three subjects that have, in different ways, mostly influced my life: I’ve been a farmer for 8 years now, I’m very keen on computers, and I’ve been going through a (re)conversion to Christianity.
At the same time, Assilvestrar has also provided some services. It’s a point of honor that all the software of the various services that I have running here are open-source and self-hosted; this means that everything that happens here, stays here, with 0 dependence on Big Corp. It’s also something that I built with the purpose of helping other people to untaggle themselves from the dependence on the FAANGs; we have our own mail server, our own calendar/contact server, a chat, RSS reader, bookmarking system, git server, and maybe more. All of these are open for anyone to apply for (why and how will be explained in the next few days.)
All in all, it has been quite a fun learning experience. But I did felt constrained by aiming it to Portuguese speakers only (and having to write longform in Portuguese), and hence why we’re now entering a new season; this project grew and matured, and so it’s more palatable for a bigger crowd.