An interview with 100 rabbits

Hundred Rabbits is an artistic duo hacking their way around the Pacific on<br>their sailboat. I invited them to sit down for an interview to talk about about<br>their lifestyle, art, philosophy, and their SourceHut projects. This<br>interview was conducted live in the #sr.ht.watercooler IRC channel on<br>Libera Chat.

Drew: Hi Devine! Happy birthday, Rek!

Rekka : Haha, thanks!

Devine waves

Drew: Would you two introduce yourselves?

Rekka : We are two artists who live and work on a sailboat named Pino. We<br>traveled around the Pacific Ocean for 5 years, learning about technological<br>resilience. I am an illustrator, but I also write, and Devine is a programmer<br>that also makes music.

Drew: Why live at sea?

Devine : We don&rsquo;t live at sea: we live on the water, near the coasts, and<br>sometimes we traverse large spans of ocean. We chose to live on a boat so we<br>could go where the wind would take us. We quickly look for shelter when we can<br>and try to limit the time we spend at sea to a minimum.

Drew: That makes sense. The sea intimidates me, to be honest.

Devine : Us, too.

Drew: Have you found your boating lifestyle to be a good platform for the<br>art projects you build?

Rekka : Yes, definitely. We find that we work really well with constraints.

Devine : A lot of our projects are advised by the extreme position in which<br>we find ourselves, away from internet connectivity and one-day delivery<br>networks.

Drew: Projects like?

Rekka : We&rsquo;re always working on our wiki, it&rsquo;s the project we update the<br>most. We document everything we learn like food preservation, boat repairs,<br>places we&rsquo;ve been, etc.

Drew: I like that community-building mindset very much, Rek.

Devine : The energy we collect from the sun dictates the number of cycles our<br>software can use to run, and how much time we can dedicate on working on the<br>computer to build them. This has ruled out a lot of modern technologies, it&rsquo;s<br>also what brought us here, to be using SourceHut in the first place.

Drew: I imagine that the energy constraints are also why many of your projects<br>involve stepping away from the computer, like food preservation and<br>log-keeping.

Devine : If we can use less technology to solve any one task, we will. Our<br>ideal amount of technologies is as little technology as possible.

Drew: You&rsquo;ve led me to another question I wanted to ask: how does SourceHut fit<br>into your workflow?

Devine : Our work is done almost entirely offline, but when we do have<br>connectivity, we&rsquo;re looking for building mirrors of our work for redundancy. As<br>much as people like to throw the words &ldquo;why don&rsquo;t you self-host&rdquo; at us, having<br>someone making sure that our repos are available while we&rsquo;re days or weeks away<br>from shore is what keeps our projects alive and gives us peace of mind.

Drew: I cannot imagine a boat in the middle of the Pacific making for a good<br>place to host a server. Did you try any other platforms before settling on<br>SourceHut?

Rekka : We were on GitHub for a few years.

Drew: How does it compare?

Devine : It&rsquo;s hard to put into words, there&rsquo;s a general trend in software<br>right now to compete for attention and skew people&rsquo;s behavior to act in favor of<br>large ecosystems. GitHub is heavily afflicted by that sickness. SourceHut, less<br>so.

Drew: Sick of manipulative corporate behavior?

Devine : Yep, that&rsquo;s the word I was looking for.

Drew: I admire the Rabbits for similar reasons: you have this down-to-earthness<br>that I can connect with.

Drew: In more practical terms, do you find the lightweight approach to<br>SourceHut&rsquo;s UI design to be easier on your power and bandwidth constraints?

Devine : It&rsquo;s worlds apart. Because we work entirely from donated second-hand<br>devices, backward compatibility is more important to us at this point. In our<br>eyes, better software is software that gets smaller over time, that sheds the<br>superfluous, and that reaches further backward in time for that onto which it<br>can run. SourceHut appealed to us instantly because there are so few examples of<br>this willingness to reduce consumption in the wild.

Drew: I use a 12 year old laptop myself. I think it&rsquo;s also important to<br>recognize that the ability to recklessly consume is a privilege that not<br>everyone has, and you&rsquo;re locking out a lot of users by only designing for the<br>latest and greatest. Even in FOSS, it can be a challenge to get people on board<br>with that philosophy.

Devine : That&rsquo;s definitely a big part of this. You can only call yourself<br>anti-capitalistic for so long while also catering only to people with the latest<br>gizmos.

Drew: On the subject of FOSS, why did you choose to release your software works<br>as free (as in freedom) software, and your artistic works with Creative<br>Commons?

Rekka : We don&rsquo;t want our projects to die with us.

Devine : We can&rsquo;t be there for people, we&rsquo;re at sea for months at a time. The<br>code has to speak...